I WENT TO PICK UP MY LEAVE CHEQUE FROM THE post office downtown. The city was getting out of control. The rest of Canada had thought that the separatist movement was a fringe element. Now polls were showing that there was a very definite possibility that we had every intention of leaving Canada.
The streets were suddenly filled with people from other provinces. Since we obviously weren’t going to listen to reason, they were trying another tactic. They were going to come and get down on their hands and knees and pray for us to stay. The airplane companies had reduced prices of flights to Montréal by ninety percent to encourage everyone to go to Montréal to convince us to vote Non.
A family walked past me waving paper Canadian flags over their heads. A man was holding a placard saying QUEBEC WE LOVE YOU! DON’T LEAVE US! They might have thought to write it in French, but what can you do?
They were having a giant rally that day that was going to outdo any of the ones that we had had. Well, that’s what the English had going for them, wasn’t it? They had numbers. They were actually proving to me, at least, what I had always known: that we were a minority that was in danger of being overwhelmed. Our culture could disappear and all that would be left of it would be little French-Canadian bobble-head dolls dressed in lumberjack shirts next to the polar bear clocks in the tourist shops.
I walked in the other direction. Nobody recognized me. There had been an article in the paper that morning saying that Étienne Tremblay had no right to be participating in the rally since he had been in prison and had been living a dissolute lifestyle. No one from outside of Québec had ever heard of Étienne Tremblay. If that didn’t prove we were a distinct society, I didn’t know what did.
That night I couldn’t sleep. It was strange to lie in bed all alone. I woke up with a chill no matter what the temperature was. The baby was squirming around so much. It was tossing and turning all night. It kicked like the neighbour banging for us to keep down the music. But it only made me feel lonelier.
I hadn’t heard anything from Raphaël. I really didn’t know anyone who could vanish into thin air like Raphaël. I always heard girls bragging about how their ex-boyfriends were stalking them and wouldn’t leave them alone. And about all the terrible fights that they would have when their husbands showed up. I was sort of envious. Anything was better than this silence.
I knew that I was as responsible for the breakup as Raphaël was, but I felt abandoned. And I wanted to feel sorry for myself. I sat on the kitchen floor and wept like a fifties housewife whose husband had run off with his secretary. Then I got bored and lonely. I couldn’t exactly go out dancing, could I?
It was almost midnight, and I knew that Étienne would likely be found at a twenty-four-hour diner called Madame Lucie. Hugo told me that Étienne had been eating at this diner all week. They had put a huge OUI sign in the window. Étienne thought that it was bold and that he should support the establishment. Hugo had filmed him from the outside, with the OUI poster in view. He had showed me the footage and asked if I thought it looked at all like the famous painting Nighthawks. I had just shrugged. I didn’t like being asked whether or not my father was a work of art.
It only took me ten minutes to walk there. I saw him through the front window, illuminated by the restaurant’s fluorescent glow. I slid into the booth, across from Étienne, as gracefully as I could given the enormity of my belly. There was a jukebox at that table that only had songs from the seventies. It had all of his songs on it, which was one of the reasons Étienne was such a strong supporter of the institution. There was one song about a turtle that was so slow, it took him eight years to go from Montréal to Chicoutimi. There was another song about a man who had twenty-five kids. Étienne sang their names really, really fast. Everyone would try to remember and sing the names in the right order when the song played on the radio. Sometimes Loulou would sing this song while mopping the floors: “Rita! Marie! André! Mario! Sebastien! Eloïse! Louise! Louise! J’ai déjà dit Louise.”
It was probably a good thing that the English couldn’t make out what these songs were going on about. There was a song about a man whose hat got blown off by the wind. It blew all the way to New York City. He ended up there selling Christmas trees for a living. There was a song about a lumberjack who went mad. It was a traditional song but Étienne had recorded a new version of it.
“Put on the song about the unhappy piece of tourtière that’s in the fridge and nobody will eat it,” I said as I settled in. I was nervous and my first reflex was to draw his attention away from my belly. There was no better way than to bring up his music.
The waitress came up and served Étienne a beer that he had already ordered. I watched him take the first holy sip. The one that makes you feel the same way as when someone is playing the trumpet in just the right way. It was as if he had been dying to take a piss and had just found a urinal. As he drank, his pupils dilated and the blue of his eyes disappeared.
Étienne put down his glass and looked hard at me, trying to figure out what on earth would be the perfect thing to say at this juncture. He wasn’t an idiot. The man could intuit that I would be hitting him up for some emotions any minute now.
“I’ve been feeling a little bit blue,” I said, getting to the point.
“People can’t even look at me,” Étienne said. “I remind them of the ravages of time. I am everything that they are going to lose. I am the inability of love to last. I had the most beautiful songs in the world—but this is something that you can’t own. I sang them until they just stopped coming one day.”
This was the only way Étienne could give advice: by describing his own hardships. His ability to feel sorry for himself was truly epic.
This was the kind of conversation that we had been having for years. It was fancy talk but nothing specific. Sort of like how fencers swirl their swords all over the place but never actually pierce each other through the heart.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life,” I insisted. “I don’t know how to go about doing anything. You see that I’m having a baby?”
“I heard,” he said, nodding toward my belly. “I thought a lot about it, too. You don’t have to raise your children, really. They raise themselves. You’re a writer, pour l’amour de dieu!”
It was out of the bag! Wanting to be a writer was the sort of thing you might be reluctant to admit, especially in Québec. Look at our very first great poet, Émile Nelligan, who went mad at twenty trying to write a book of poems about angels. That Étienne knew my secret was surprising to me. But he was good at intuiting what people’s talents were. He was abominable at recognizing their feelings, however.
“You’re too intelligent to be changing diapers. Why don’t you give the child to your mother-in-law to be raised? Don’t feel guilty if you have to do it. It’s for a higher calling.”
I wasn’t sure that I had heard what I thought that I had heard. Étienne seemed to think that he was on some sort of roll. He just continued in the same vein.
“If you have a baby, you’re supposed to be their slave from here on in? They come first? But why? If Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives birth to a sadistic petty thief, then the sadistic member of society is more valuable than the most important philosopher on earth. Rousseau should stop writing in order to worry about his waste-of-space son? No, children don’t come first. A person’s raison d’être must always come first.”
I was insulted. He was basically saying that Nicolas and I had been a waste of time and his talents. I was in an indignant mood that night. I started shifting toward the end of the seat in order to leave.
“I wrote you some notes for a speech,” I said. “I don’t know if you’re interested. You’re probably not interested. You’ve probably already prepared something. You probably already have something that you want to go ahead and say.”
“Show me what you have,” he said seriously, holding out his left hand. With his right, he reached into the inside pocket of his blazer and took out a pair of reading glasses.
“Fantastic, fantastic, my darling,” he said, not even having read it yet. “You stick to this. You’ll go far.”
I looked at Étienne poring over the scrap of paper. All that he valued in me was that I was some sort of artist too. So I decided to forget for a moment that I was a human being. We were just two poets sitting at a diner in the middle of the night, discussing our work. It offered me a respite. Anyways, it was better than going home to be alone in my kitchen, experiencing emotions. It must be nice sometimes to have an all-consuming philosophy that includes not really caring about anyone other than yourself.