UNHOLY STORIES
PROSE SERIES 72
TRANSLATED BY NORA ALLEYN
GUERNICA
Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)
2005
Contents
Monster
M
If Only
Maiden Name
Island
A Mother Up in Arms
Corridor to Eternity
An Unholy Story
Monsieur George
Female
Grotto
Corinne Gilbert’s Daughter
I do not care for the body, I love the timid
soul; it hides for it is afraid.
Emily Dickinson,
Letters
Monster
People are hurrying into the Dollar Store before closing time. The snow is falling thickly. Large wet butterflies stick to my eyes almost blinding me. With just twenty dollars in my wallet, I wander through the aisles looking for something special. My biggest thrill is buying an item, then asking people how much they think I paid for it and where I got it.
“You must have bought it on Laurier Street or Bernard Street,” my mother would exclaim. “You’ve gone and blown your whole pay on St. Denis Boulevard,” my daughter would say.
It never fails. People are always misled by the appearance of things. Today, it’s quite a challenge because I have only fifteen minutes left to find a present that looks original. The store used to be called Rossy’s. It was my favourite place to buy baby pyjamas and undershirts which I would stack on the changing table. In my dreams, they became designer baptismal gowns for unborn children, or for the ugly and abandoned ones.
A Haitian woman and her daughter are busy examining a man’s dressing-gown. A Latino woman has generic potato chips in her basket and an impressive quantity of marshmallow hearts that were fresher two weeks ago. The counters spill over with foodstuffs at ridiculously low prices. Employees unpack boxes of artificial flowers that make you think of an early spring: “April in Paris,” “Spring is in the Air” …
A salesperson scolds customers who are intent on rearranging her flowers as soon as she places them on the shelves. To the manager’s stunned amazement, two children with snow-encrusted boots are cheerfully stomping on their own flower arrangements.
I have to act quickly. The head cashier has already locked the door. She is stalking down the aisles in pursuit of latecomers, numbing them with a glacial eye. I choose a new-style flashlight like the one advertised on television and sold here for next to nothing. And that includes even the batteries. At last I’ll be able to dress in the cupboard without too much trouble. Today is Valentine’s Day. It had totally slipped my mind. As I go by the counter for men’s underwear, I spot Calvin Klein boxer shorts on sale. I drop a pair into my basket and head for the cash register. The manager is checking out clients’ bags at the door. She nods her head by way of saying Good-bye, thank you.
*
My boyfriend and I have a date. But the lovers’ official holiday is not the best time for a tête-à-tête. The restaurant is packed. The waitresses, all dolled up in red, tender a rose to all the women. I choose a seat by the wall where I can watch the people inside the restaurant and on the street. I wait, sipping a red cocktail that tastes of mint. There are women alone and there are couples. Suddenly, I spot them. Unlike everyone else, their eyes are not glued to their Caesar salad. The young man, with a rose in his lapel, looks like a newlywed. I can see half of the girl’s face reflected in the French door, the other half is in the shade. I sip my cocktail that tastes green, I doodle on the tablecloth. The waitress offers me a second drink that I automatically accept. I turn the place mat into an agenda and jot down my chores for the coming week.
The attentive young man cuts up his beloved’s tagliatelle and prepares mouthfuls as if he were feeding a child. I sigh and say to myself that love, real love, will never be mine. The beloved’s fork clangs onto the tile floor. The newlywed husband rushes to pick it up. She hasn’t yet faced the customers in the restaurant. Oddly, I don’t understand a single word she says even though she speaks loudly. Their conversation is very animated and punctuated with flirty little kisses all mixed in with pasta, salad and mouthfuls of wine.
My boyfriend finally arrives. He loves the boxer shorts. We eat. I forget about the “ideal couple” during the main course. Our conversation becomes livelier. We talk about aging gracefully, a healthy lifestyle, heredity and “young old people” who inject themselves with hormones that are supposed to slow down the biological clock.
I graduate from the mentholated cocktail to red wine, and guzzle more than a respectable amount. The pasta is overcooked and the sauce tastes like melted rubber. A culinary disaster, judging by the quantity of food people are leaving on their plates.
The beloved gets up with difficulty. My boyfriend whispers to me that she must be disabled. Her knight-in-attendance slides the crutches under her arms. She heads for the washroom. I am finally able to have a good look at her. The woman is a veritable monster. Her nose is off-centre. Her bulbous eyes roll around emptily in their sockets and I notice that she is blind. Her mouth, without lips, wears a faint smile. But her face, so bereft of aesthetic qualities, is wonderfully human. She leans on her man. The door closes behind her. Her guide waits for her, quietly, by the washroom door.
When I was a child living at home in the east end, I could see from my room the little tower of the asylum where all the crazy people lived. I could picture these creatures that had so often been described to me, and that at this late hour were probably out taking the air like everyone else. Men with horses’ heads, porcine children, one-eyed women: a mysterious collection of human beings, a modern bestiary speaking with medieval accents. After imagining this universe, I would go back to bed, shivering with fright and guilt. In the middle of the night, I would wake up and they would all be standing around me, staring and whispering among themselves. I would shout at them that I was normal while my father, looking bewildered, was telling me to get up so I wouldn’t be late for school.
*
I don’t know if I’m good-looking or not or if I’ve ever been good-looking. It hurts just to think about it. My Valentine scolds me for even entertaining these thoughts in view of this poor woman’s affliction. I’ve probably gone too far so I swallow my worries and lapse into silence. The guide of the ugliest woman in the world pushes open the washroom door and helps his charge back to the table. Now that night has fallen, her face is reflected in the French door of the restaurant and I can’t stop myself from staring.
With her eyes lifted upwards, she is smiling. When she speaks, her hands move nervously and an aura hovers around her hair. I look at my own reflection in the French door.
I am the monster.
“If I weren’t afraid of looking ridiculous, I’d go over and ask her about her life and the circumstances of her birth.”
“Why not about her death while you’re at it?”
“Did you know that in 1929, on Valentine’s Day, Al Capone and his gang wiped out their rivals in a bloody feud? Did you ever see a picture of that mobster?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, he was hideous.”
The angel of darkness leaves the restaurant with her shining knight. The hostess gives them the left-over roses. Since we have nothing more to say to each other, I ask for the bill. The party is over.
M
As a baby, Nat would confuse the words for ocean and river, yes and no, yesterday and tomorrow.
“Yesterday, Mummy, I went to the ocean,” she said, pointing to the narrow little stream that flows behind the family cottage.
Later, when she was around seven or eight, she would decline her mother’s name as mine, minack, mac, moonsize, mayo. The terms would vary according to her mood and the situation. She baptized her cat Nutmeg. She saved him from a sad demise one day when he was being tossed around with the bath towels in the dryer. There were the Ms and the others, the M & Ms, the yesterdays, the tomorrows, there was herself, things, bears, dogs, stuffed ostriches. Words and things that began with M and ended with infinity. There was astrology and the signs: Taurus, Aries, Pisces, and she was a Pisces. Her cheeks covered with eczema made her think she was a sea creature. She would cut out the horoscope, read lessons into the signs – commandments that she observed to the letter.
When one is twelve like Nat – and stubborn to boot – life can be difficult. A part of her is wounded and she doesn’t know it or won’t recognize it.
I could tell you her story, insist on those times when she gets along fine with her mother, I could point out her bad points too, but it would be unfair and only confirm our preconceived ideas about adolescence.
Nat is cruel. She likes to pin photos of young male singers on her bedroom walls and physically attack them. “There isn’t a speck of white wall left,” she tells her little friends who come and sit on her bed Friday evenings or Saturday afternoons. They are ruthless when they start talking about the different singers. Some of the girls lavish marriage advice at them while the more heartless girls test them by aiming darts at their more vulnerable parts. The boys continue to grin amiably and to maintain suggestive poses in their immaculate, well-pressed clothes. Sometimes, when the darts pierce the body, plaster powder spills onto the carpet that Nat’s mother will vacuum up tomorrow. The girls go home, feeling great.
When she was around six, Nat joined the Brownies. She was not yet interested in singers. In fact, she had even started being nice to her younger brother. They would navigate together on the living-room sofa and create a reconstituted family with their stuffed animals. Fate seemed to have spared them a cruel normality. Today, she has quit the Girl Scouts, but is still as tender as ever with her male stuffed animals, bear cubs and other stand-ins.
Perhaps when Nat was in the womb, her mother brushed up against too many bearded or hairy men. Did she decide to get rid of her animals or did her father push her into doing it? History has it that every day she insisted on bringing a different male animal to school with her. By first year high school, this whim had become a serious problem. The stuffed animals finally sought refuge in a chest reserved for the trousseaus of future brides.
“I’ll put them in the trunk of the car later,” Nat announced triumphantly to her mother who, every year, unfailingly fails her driver’s licence.
As for her brother, in her mind he no longer exists. But, unlike the guys pinned to the walls of her bunker, he talks, shouts, eats, listens to television and makes questionable noises. He doesn’t smile anymore, he burps. Is that why Nat often says that her only brother has been reported missing on one of those planets he travels to via Game Boy?
*
The day after Christmas, she asks her mother to turn off her bedside lamp, and to kiss her goodnight.
Under her quilt, her stuffed offspring are arranged clockwise. The biggest one, with his stomach ripped open, is in the middle. In the meantime, Nat is hiding somewhere in the room. Her mother sits down on the bed and surveys the damage. Her daughter’s newest ritual takes her aback. Did Nat pick this up at the Girl Scouts? A big M is drawn in red on the body of the patriarchal bear whom she has so often praised, especially when she is separated from it. The beanie babies are displayed according to the colours of the rainbow. They play the mourners’ role. Nat emerges from her hiding-place, runs for the bed and pulls up the quilt.
“M, Mummy, M,” she whispers.
At first her mother thought it was a new bedtime ritual. How many times had she been obliged to repeat the whole love routine.
“Mummy, I go to bed, you put the cassette in the radio, you kiss me, you turn off the light and if you make a mistake, you have to start all over again.”
This request prompted the mother to consult a therapist.
Nat has stopped the mechanism of the ballerina in the jewelry box. She has draped the dancer in red metallic paper. Her walls, stripped bare of their icons, have a lonely look about them. From the green bag in the middle of the room, the muffled cries of the young male singers create a kind of Muzak.
She murmurs M like a mantra when her mother finally releases the fateful word.
“Menstruated, Nat?”
Despite all the information sessions with the school nurse, the explanatory brochures in which companies insert candy-coloured samples, Nat is still at the stage of magical thinking. The grocer gives pounds of butter to the men and women who want to make biscuits. The bus that passed her by didn’t remember that there was a stop.
After a while, Nat plucks a pile of blood-stained panties out of her wicker wastepaper basket and holds them out. Then, in a strange confrontational gesture, she suddenly throws them in her mother’s face.
“Wash them, Mummy, or throw them away?”
If Only
My brother has a disturbing kind of beauty; my father does not. And yet the two bare a strange resemblance.
We were ten years old when Éliane came into our lives. Up until then, we had formed a cocoon. My father was totally devoted to us. We reciprocated his affection. My brother and I were like one and the same person. And yet we hadn’t shared the same placental envelope; we hadn’t swum in the same amniotic fluid. I was born eighteen months before him. As soon as he arrived in the uncertain world of my parents, I could already sense his weaknesses.
Tonight, I am able to observe them at close range. My brother invited our ex-stepmother for dinner. He leaves her waiting in the living-room. He says he has important questions to ask her about our childhood and claims that she knows more about us than our own mother. France, our birth mother, suffers from amnesia. At least, that is what she tells my brother. He asks me to leave the table after dessert.
We share the same apartment since my father decided that we were old enough not to depend on him anymore. Our close friends like to tease us. My brother claims that it is just a temporary arrangement. More often than not, my father pays his share of the rent. Instead of saving money, everything my brother earns from doing odd jobs goes up his nose. He says he needs dope to get through the day, and that that is also a temporary situation.
I tell him he has invented the word temporary. He criticizes me for not taking into account the theory of relativity.
He dreams of inventing video games, of working for a big company. But the problem with my brother is, he always sabotages himself when he gets an interesting job. He arrives late, he makes love to the boss’s wife, or doesn’t finish what he starts.
But I love him regardless.
“I’ve invited Éliane,” he tells me, “because she has good connections with media people. I’d feel better if you weren’t around.”
“What you really mean is that our childhood is just a pretext to piss me off. You don’t want to go back to that dark time in our lives anymore than I do. Introspection never was your strong point.”
He doesn’t answer and goes back into the kitchen, ostensibly to chop the vegetables. Silence reigns in the apartment all afternoon. Sometimes, I hear him sniffing and cutting his coke in the bathroom on the glass frame of a post-modern artist’s version of Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus. At one point, he phones his pusher. I hear his “See you tonight” and then he shuts himself up in his room.
Éliane arrives on time. She is a tall woman in her forties and lacks confidence. My brother isn’t ready. He passed the afternoon commuting between Venus and the computer.
We both wait in the living-room for him to come out of the kitchen with the good news: “Supper is ready.” After devouring everything in sight – the cocktail biscuits, the pistachios and the olives – we go into the kitchen. The counter is in such a state of chaos that it’s difficult to figure out what the menu is. I suggest we adjourn to the restaurant next door.
I don’t accompany them. My brother has already had too much to drink. At five the following afternoon, he is still in bed. Usually, at that hour, he comes home from work. When finally he gets up, he looks pretty shaky.
He’s wrapped in his comforter. He starts to cry for the first time in years. He keeps repeating that it wasn’t his fault, not to tell our father, or his girlfriend, that he was just an idiot, a good-for-nothing, that he couldn’t control himself, that as usual he had spoiled the evening. Furious, I shout at him to tell me what happened.
“It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.”
That’s what he had kept repeating the time he closed my father’s car trunk with our luggage and the keys inside.
“Brilliant,” my father had said, slapping him. We had had to prolong our stay just long enough for my father’s mistress to arrive without warning. Éliane was in a state.
Only moments after my brother’s admission that he kissed Éliane, my father stuck his nose around the back screen door.
“Can’t you come to the front like everybody else?” I say.
“And how did your evening go with Éliane? Is she still with that asshole?”
“How are we supposed to know, Dad? In any case your questions don’t interest us.”
My brother wraps himself in his Looney Tunes comforter and disappears down the hall.
We drop the subject of Éliane. My father talks about her when his girlfriend isn’t around. He confides in me, a bit like my brother does. He doesn’t know what transpired between Éliane and my brother, but he has an idea. Too proud to ask, he contents himself with saying: “If only I could start over.”
The older my brother gets, the more he looks like my father. He has put on weight, is impossible with women, and then regrets the things he does.
When I move in with my boyfriend, I feel like calling Éliane. Then my brother announces that he has just renewed contact with our birth mother whom he happened to bump into at La Cabane on the Main. I was just about to tell him that I had met Éliane with her new lover, who just happens to be my brother’s best friend.
Maiden Name
At first, the doctor talks about heredity. He does the rounds of my entire family (the paternal side, the maternal side) and asks some pointed questions. Then he takes a sheet of paper out of his filing-cabinet.
“Your mother’s maiden name?”
“Alive? Dead?”
He responds to my answers by ticking off boxes with a red pencil. I don’t always tell him the truth. Why should he know so much about me? I clam up like an oyster. My mouth fills with pebbles, they are grinding under my teeth.
I don’t know why but that is the image that pops into my mind!
I hear him say: “Wait a minute, young lady, I have exactly what you need,” while he unlocks his medicine cabinet.
*
After the break-ins, the police interrogate me several times. Living above a doctor’s office leaves you wide open to all kinds of crazy situations. The thieves – or rather the addicts, I should say – are always on the lookout for morphine. The third or fourth time there was a break-and-enter (I can’t remember), I had a strange meeting with one of the two young policemen who had my mother’s maiden name pinned to his jacket. It is an unusual family name. After a few minutes, we discover we’re related.
“What do you know!”
At least, that’s what he says, smiling.
*
Dr. Laprise hands me a box with the face of a sadlooking woman on the package.
“Take these samples. I’ll give you a prescription – one pill in the evening at mealtimes. You won’t feel the effects right away, but in five or six weeks, you’ll see the difference.”
My cousin Mike is patrolling the neighbourhood. Every time he sees me in the street, he stops, rolls down the window of the cruiser and starts a conversation.
“Ever gone for a ride in a cruiser?”
Seated in back, behind the grill, I look like the guilty one. When he starts the siren, the whole situation becomes downright ludicrous.
“I’m too old for this kind of thing,” I tell him.
He pouts for two weeks. I make sure to vary my itinerary whenever I go out for a walk in the neighbourhood. I use the alleyways, the backyards. But Mike always finds me. He’s been patrolling these streets named after the saints for so long that they hold no mystery for him. I give up in the face of such determination.
*
Dr. Laprise asks me when exactly I started having these anxiety attacks. What was the trigger? I answer that the day my roommate vacuumed twice on the same day, I cracked up. At first, it was like an allergy attack or asthma. I’d breathe through lunch bags to help my breathing. After getting rid of all the allergens at home, I still had the odd attack.
“What do you see when you think of these crises?”
“A vacuum-cleaner, electric blankets, a long footbridge in space, subway air vents, the sidewalks on the Jacques-Cartier Bridge.”
*
Transferred to foot patrol, Mike and his colleague walk up and down the streets of my neighbourhood, stopping at every shop. They know my habits and my haunts. Dr. Laprise said that one of these days I’d have to face my family tree.
Some time after the series of thefts, I’m summoned to a police line-up to identify the suspect. I know three out of the five individuals. I’ve seen them hanging around but I’m not about to say that they robbed my neighbour the doctor! Their arms, covered with scars and tattoos, are hidden in the sleeves of their long cotton Fruit of the Loom T-shirts.
I don’t identify anyone. And yet, one of these five guys forced open the doctor’s cupboard. When it’s over, Mike takes me aside.
“Come to the police station this evening, we’ll go and have a beer.”
I don’t have scars on my arms or legs, but I have them elsewhere. Difficult to know where exactly – invisible lesions. Even a scanner couldn’t detect my wounds. Dr. Laprise had talked to me about neurotransmitters, substances that circulate in the brain, responsible for pain or happiness.
With Mike, we talk about the drug network, the small pushers, the big shots and the police as an occupying force, retirement at forty-five. He shares with me his secret dream of opening a tanning salon. I’m amazed. We keep putting off the subject that we both have in mind. But this time, we have no choice. Out of his bag he takes a spiral notebook filled with different coloured writing and unfolds the family tree. A big knotty tree whose many branches form a trellis. The boxes for the ancestors’ names and their descendants are empty.
“Your tree looks more like a weeping willow than an oak.”
“I’m going over there this summer to fill in the bloody boxes.”
“Do you realize that in Europe, with so many wars, important family papers might have disappeared? Our family doesn’t exist anymore, that’s what I tried to tell the doctor.”
After the tree incident, we don’t see each other for many years. My father’s death is an opportunity to renew contact. Mike is divorced, and lost his tanning salon to his ex. I left the apartment above the doctor’s to go back to my old neighbourhood. I am married. A daughter was born from a first union and another from the second. The anxiety attacks are less frequent, but they returned full force with the births of my daughters. Dr. Laprise has retired. He referred me to a colleague who is a psychiatrist. New medication has come on the market, and I even agreed to take part in a study.
Other family members have moved away. Most of them have my mother’s maiden name. At the funeral parlour, they come up and shake hands, or give me a kiss.
“You are your mother’s daughter,” they say, laughing, “The resemblance is striking.”
My cousin Mike is standing at the entrance with his son, busy shaking hands. It’s winter, but they’re looking as tanned as if they had lounged by a pool all afternoon.
I avoid looking at them.
Island
Alex and I stop at the only snack-bar to ask directions from a run-down old waitress decked out in a skimpy uniform that is supposed to look erotic. I watch her going around the tables, making circular motions with her rag instead of really cleaning them. We’re looking for a place to sleep, anything. Two chairs stuck together will do. We’ve bicycled all day under the pouring rain. The woman shows us a trailer park that sometimes takes in tourists. This is our final stop of the day. Our hostess, alerted by the waitress, is waiting for us on the doorstep. She asks us to come in, to feel at home, they are just about to sit down to supper.
I glance around the dining-room table. Ten girls of various ages, but with a striking resemblance to one another, are eating their soup. I am instantly reminded of the Dionne quintuplets. Some have braids, others have the same hairdo as their mother, blow-dried with bangs stiffened with hairspray. The father, who is at the other end of the table, doesn’t look up when we sit down. The entire meal is eaten in silence. Flies land on the oilskin tablecloth and then fly off. The father jerks his hand around to get rid of them. As soon as he finishes his soup, he gets up, asks us where we’re from, and what we’re doing on the island. I lie about our destination. The daughters remain seated, ramrod straight, waiting for a signal from their father. The mother is busy around the stove when an older girl bursts into the room with someone who seems to be her husband. The two men exchange glances and the girl apologizes profusely.
“I didn’t know you had boarders,” she says.
The mother introduces her daughter.
“This is my eldest, Marie-Lynne.”
She wears her dyed blonde hair in a boy’s cut.
The ten others cry out in unison “Hi, MarieLynne”. No one pays any attention to the man accompanying her. The mother introduces her other daughters. They are all named after actresses: Betty, Greta, Marilyn, Audrey…
*
The son-in-law smokes Export A without a filter and is watching a show on an American station. He seems indifferent to the father-in-law’s behaviour, and the evening unfolds according to a script that seems set in advance. Around ten o’clock, the mother goes towards the only bedroom on the first floor and prepares our bed. The signal is given. Marie-Lynne and her husband leave and the others go up to bed in silence. The father follows the girls.
Our room overlooks the campground. It is not yet dark but I can see the little lanterns swaying over the trailers. A doll dressed in an intricate red crocheted dress plays the role of mascot on the bed. Alex hates this kind of decoration. He pitches the doll against the door.
Coral-coloured arabesques ripple over the beige bedspread, with faces that shift according to wind and light. The night promises to be a cold one. We sleep stuck to each other. I don’t like the mattress. Alex feels like having a cigarette. In my dream, I see the RCA Victor dog complaining about his master’s voice and weeping over his fate. His barking wakes me up. Alex isn’t there. I get up, open the window. A little air slips into the narrow room. I lie down, then stare at the doll who becomes animated. Her lips move.
I wake up in the small hours of the morning. Alex is seated by my side, reading Le Journal de Québec. The headlines: Islanders Refuse to Be Linked to The Continent.
I turn towards the window and automatically reach for his pillow. Once again, he has disappeared.
The continents are taking shape, somewhere between Asia and America. Zebras, antelopes and mammoths crowd onto the strips of land. The less fortunate animals are sucked under by the waves. Men, women and children attempt to save themselves from the cataclysm. Clouds of birds of ill omen swarm across the sky. I try to read the future in their movements. A groaning rises up from the centre of the earth. Hedgehogs, crickets, iguanas are all trying to be born in the midst of the cataclysm. Suddenly, I find myself on a glacier surrounded by bears and serpents. Alex offers me his hand. But his face changes. The father of the actresses smiles at me. I sink into the icy waters of the glacier.
It is daylight. The lanterns are out. I hear gurgling in the pipes, toilets flushing and murmuring. The family is seated at breakfast. The actresses eat quickly.
“Pancakes or eggs?”
“Just toast for me.”
I notice an empty place.
“Are you looking for your friend?” says the mother. “He’s out smoking on the verandah. He’s a foreigner, isn’t he? My husband couldn’t figure out where on earth he comes from.”
“His mother is American and his father is Romanian like Nadia Comaneci, the queen of the Olympics. He’s quite a mixture! That’s why he has a strange accent. But he lives in Montreal now, like me.”
We had planned to spend two days on the island, but without even consulting each other, we decide that our stay has lasted long enough.
We don’t know why exactly, we just feel there is something wrong. Certain noises, odours. Nobody talks in this house, only the mother.
We jump on our bicycles and head for the main road. We should be in the next village by noon. Just a few spins of the wheels away, says Alex, laughing. I’m already having a hard time by the time we reach the first hill. A pick-up honks and pulls off to the side.
“I’m the guy who smokes Export A. Want a lift to the ferry? The hills are steep around here.”
His name is Simon. He has been married to one of the American “actresses” for five years. He says they still think of him as a foreigner. He’s not a native islander but he’ll always live here. The gravel pings on the doors of the big Dodge. He’s constantly checking me out in the rear-view mirror, as if to seek my approval.
“You know, my father-in-law… he’s not always okay with his daughters… Do you want to stop in the village for a coffee?” he asks. “It’s still early, only ten o’clock.”
I turn and look at the river. Tension mounts, the words of the radio announcer get mixed up with Simon’s. Sometimes I wonder who is doing the talking.
A green sign indicates the ferry. If he continues to drive this fast, he won’t have time to finish his story. Just as I get this feeling, he slows down.
Too late to say no. The Dodge is parked in front of the snack bar Chez Tammy’s Sexy Waitresses. We slam the doors, the topless doll hanging from the rear-view mirror swings back and forth.
Simon turns to the waitress.
“Three big Molsons, doll, with a smile.”
He continues his story.
“My father-in-law refused to sell part of his land for the trailer park, stubborn old geezer. It’s not easy to marry an island girl.”
Simon explains how he went about it. MarieLynne cut her braids after they made love. He kept one in a Ziploc bag, and he gave the other one to his father-in-law who immediately got the picture.
“At first she thought she’d never set foot at the old man’s again, but I cut a deal with him.”
Video poker machines line the room. Players feed them compulsively, cigarette dangling, glass in hand. The waitresses weave in and out, keeping the players supplied with change. They look as if they’re out to save lives. One by one, the customers drift over to our table and greet Simon. They’ll grab at any excuse to join in the conversation which is mostly about the old guy’s harem.
“He trades his daughters for a case of beer.”
“He’ll accept an advance on the welfare cheques of his clients.”
“It’s not worse than marrying your cousin.”
“Nobody will denounce him because there are others worse than him on the island.”
The customers at Chez Tammy’s each have their own version of the story. I’m anxious to leave the island but Alex dreams of getting on his bike and pedalling till he drops, up and down the steep hills. Simon is on his second round of Molsons when the manager of the trailer park comes into the bar. The customers, the waitresses, the whole island knows why he holds a grudge against the old man.
“The Juvenile Protection Squad will soon be on his case,” says a customer.
“Never, never,” says Simon, shaking his head.
“You, the foreigners, you were almost two days at the old guy’s, you didn’t notice anything strange?” asks the owner of the trailer park.
I speak of the lanterns that swayed in the wind, the names of the actresses, the hairdos of the girls and the continental drift. But Alex insists he didn’t hear a thing.
If we want to catch the ferry, we have only ourselves to rely on. Simon is past even seeing us. Once on the Rive-à-Belle, we feel the island slowly detaching itself. The engines propel us towards the continent. There are only outsiders travelling today.
A Mother Up in Arms
My dearest angel,
They’ll say I’m trying to be like Machine-Gun Molly but they don’t know anything about poverty and shame. Sure, I’ve stolen little things in my time, but I’ve never carried a weapon. Do you remember all the chocolates, and the marbles in a red net, and the packages of chewing gum, the Flintstone vitamins that I would lift from the counters of the all-night pharmacy? I’d hide these little surprises in my pockets. A three-year-old child thinks the whole pharmacy belongs to him; he recreates the universe in his pockets; he doesn’t owe anything to anybody.
When we’d get back to our three-room apartment, we would look over our spoils together. I was teaching you war and you didn’t know it. A strange kind of war, the survival war.
Your father said he couldn’t pay neither for the essentials nor the extras. And that, my angel, leads to crime.
At night, I would shut myself up in the bathroom while you slept. I was thinking about our future – food, rent and milk money, a lot of milk, and not just any old kind.
“Similac or Enfalac,” the pediatrician had said, “Your boy is light as a feather. You should have stopped smoking during your pregnancy.”
Similac is hard to steal, but I learned fast. Just like before you were born, when I was stealing 26-ouncers of gin and vodka for your father. A pregnant woman is above suspicion. Yet despite these special feedings, you remained puny.
And then your father left us.
“I can’t take care of your needs. The baby takes up too much room,” he complained.
I thought your future was assured because of the magic milk. So I stopped concentrating on my future in order to concentrate on yours. You had just turned four; I had already tried to commit suicide for the second time, in the bathroom. After almost losing you, I no longer felt like cheating fate. I wanted you tall, strong, respected by all, owner of a pretty house in the suburbs or in one of Montreal’s rich neighbourhoods. I promised to throw away all the razor blades, to do nothing that could separate us, but nothing ever happens as planned. In your third year of high school, you owned up to me that you had dropped out of school a while ago. You were spending your days at Chez Léo’s, the corner store, or else in the arcades filling your mind with dreams.
At twenty, you clean carpets for minimum wage. That’s why I want you to wait for me in the parkinglot of the gas station in the rental car I got for a ridiculous price. We’ll have a beautiful Christmas together with the money. You won’t have to do overtime, no more motel rugs to clean. We’ll go to Florida, we’ll buy a video, a DVD player; if we need money when we get back, we’ll sell them at the bar or a pawn shop.
Just wait for me in the car. I have everything we need: the weapon and a hood are on the kitchen table in front of me. For the last time, I point the gun to my head because I want to feel death close up like I used to with the razor blades. But I don’t want to kill anyone. I only want people at the corner store to show me some respect. My doctor renewed my prescription for Ativan. You’ll have to take some too if you want to get through it. But no coke, please no coke. Swear to me you won’t take any.
Tomorrow morning we’ll do our first rehearsal so that you can check out the exits in case it turns out badly. Trust me, everything will be fine. Just imagine that you are waiting for me quietly outside the bathroom door.
When I’m inside, watch what’s happening in the rear-view mirror. Nobody should see your face. As soon as I come out of the store, concentrate on the steering-wheel, don’t wait until I have closed the door. Go, drive fast, head straight for the highway. Turn up the radio, metal rock, anything.
Learn the routine by heart. Remember, every second counts. It’s no longer “no future” like you often say to me. There will still be times when we’ll remake the world. Remember the big bright pharmacy with its instant happiness?
As soon as we get home, I’ll put the money in metal boxes; I’ll get rid of the gun. Around five, you’ll go to the bar to buy a gram of coke. If your pusher asks you questions, you’ll say that you cleaned all the carpets of the motels on the South Shore.
When they shot the Italian woman, I must have been eleven or twelve. Her picture haunted me even in my dreams. I could see my own face in her distorted features. Her photo was on the front page. She was lying in a pool of blood, her skirt pulled up over her thighs. She had a son at the time of the tragedy. Apparently, he has suffered the same fate as his mother.
My angel, did you ever think who you might be if you had been born to someone else?
Corridor to Eternity
Despite her slight build, she lifts her son into her arms. The child is covered with sweat and vomit. When they arrive at the Emergency Room, he is sleeping. The triage nurse at the reception desk does a pre-diagnosis: “It could have been an epileptic seizure,” she says, and makes it a priority 2 case.
Tristan detests physical activity. The smell of the gym sends him into an altered state. This morning, after the compulsory run, he could feel the heat rise to his head and he collapsed. His mother arrived in a state of panic. The instructor told her that he had vomited and was now sleeping. She advised his mother to consult a doctor. At the clinic, the receptionist called the ambulance to rush him to the hospital. The boy, almost ten, was wearing red shorts and a T-shirt inscribed with the words: U.F.O. Mission of Saint Anastias, Quebec. In the waiting-room, children and more children, accompanied by their parents, are alternately whining or sleeping or screaming each in turn. During the first half-hour, a harsh voice calls out, at regular intervals, the name of a certain Burger baby, sending a ripple of laughter through the waiting-room. The parents never materialize at the desk. The employee in charge of processing of patients automatically advances the waiting time at the dispenser – two hours, three hours. It has little effect on the patients or the atmosphere in the Emergency Room. The children are constantly begging their exhausted parents for soft drinks, chocolates, candies. Tristan’s mother, seated motionless on the orange chair with her unconscious son in her arms, watches him for any sign of life. Most of the children have such loud, shrill voices that it’s hard to believe they are emitted by such frail little bodies. The boy is in a fetal position, as if he were enfolded in the quiet of the womb, waiting for the great act of birth. His head is lying against his mother’s shoulder and his legs are folded under.
An intern comes up to Tristan’s mother. Two nurses lift the body and set him on a gurney.
“We’re going up to Neurology, Madame, please follow us.”
*
Tristan can overhear their conversation. He doesn’t want to go back to Phys. Ed. so he keeps his eyes closed. He can feel his mother’s breath and the agitation all around him. They stick pins into the top of his head. He finds himself in what looks like an enormous metal sarcophagus. Electric waves tickle the inside of his brain. He doesn’t find the effect disagreeable. He wonders if his mother has taken the time to bring the toys he likes best. When the Pharaohs, like their subjects, went to sleep for eternity, they were accompanied not only by small objects but also by furniture from their bedrooms, kitchens and living-rooms. Their tombs resembled safes. Tristan’s bed is where he collects crayons, volcano craters and magic key-rings. The Egyptians taught him to preserve the elements essential for conquering life in the hereafter. Moreover, Tristan has already read amazing revelations on the origins of the pyramids in an issue of Science & Life. One particularly restless night, the Martians disembarked from their spacecraft. They came as great conquerors and invaded the royal tombs.
Thanks to this inside information, Tristan is able to make his way along the corridors leading up to the chambers, because he has already studied their location on a map. To his astonishment, the King and Queen each have their own pyramid for eternity. And yet, at the Côte-des-Neiges Cemetery, his grandfather and grandmother are buried side by side. Other family members will eventually join them, their names and dates of birth are already inscribed on the huge tombstone. His mother has explained to him that all the family members will rest together for eternity.
“Will they still quarrel?” he had asked, worried.
She turned her back, opened the tap and let the water run over the muddy lettuce.
*
For the second test, the nurse gives the boy a powerful sedative. He remains waiting in the antechamber of the great pyramid. Everything is dark despite the light filtering through the passageways and galleries leading to the funeral chambers. It’s a soft diffused light just the way he likes it. At night, when he goes to bed, he leaves the door ajar and when his mother, exasperated, closes it, he secretly plugs in a nightlight so that he can read if he feels like it, and sit in the front row to watch for the arrival of these strange beings that he is so afraid of. Egyptians and Martians – none of this is very clear in his mind. Today, the answer he is looking for doesn’t come to him.
Who will he meet on the other side of the antechamber? The good ones or the bad ones?
As he moves down the corridor, he can’t feel his body anymore. The light has disappeared, it is night-time, like in his worst nightmares. He can’t hear anything. The voices of the nurse and his mother have gradually faded. He can no longer feel his lower limbs. Are they still part of his body? He feels a prickling shoot up his arms, his neck and into his head. An electric storm, like the others he has survived, is building up. Will he see this one through? He feels so weary that he is overcome by a desire to sleep. He is alone in the pyramid that King Khufu has built for his grandson. Soon the door will close. He struggles with time, neither short nor long, feeling helpless. The day before the epileptic seizure, he had divulged to his mother a dream in which extra-terrestrials had landed in the back yard with the intention of kidnapping him. His mother had advised him to chase them away by setting out bread crumbs, an earth food they absolutely detested.
Suddenly, he remembers that he saved the crusts from his morning toast. His legendary lack of appetite will save him from certain death.
When he emerges from the time capsule, his mother is waiting for him with a gift, with an album, Where Is Charlie? In the pyramids. The nurse removes the electrodes from his head and reads the encephalogram.
Tristan understands that his worst enemies have capitulated. The message they left with the nurse and his mother on papyrus is straightforward.
He learns soon after this adventure the exact name of the illness that removes any desire for physical activity and sets him apart from other children his own age. He is happy that for a few brief moments, he was the brave assistant of Indiana Jones. He doesn’t ask for more.
An Unholy Story
The girl’s name is Corinne Gilbert. Ever since grade school, she has dreamt of becoming a saint. She loves to look at pictures of Christ on the cross. And of his Sacred Heart! Her collection of holy pictures so impressed the nuns that they organized an exhibition for their protégée. In grade ten during Latin class, Sister Marie-Évariste singled out the girls most likely to don a novice’s robe. Corinne Gilbert was named a candidate.
She has been mutilating herself for some time now – wrists, feet, hair, sometimes even her eyelashes.
This aspect of pain fascinates her. She refuses the invitation that has been issued. She likes to model her behaviour on the lives of Saint Theresa of Avila, Catherine of Sienna and Kateri Tekakwitha whose village she visited the previous summer.
Her parents are unaware of her aversion to food. More than once, a charitable soul has picked her up in the bus or on the subway. When these special moments occur, she is ready for them. The heat rises up through her body and travels to her extremities. The effect, similar to a heroin hit, does not last. When the sensation lessens, her arms and legs fold and she collapses. She hates the changes that her body is undergoing: her roundness, her face attacked by acne, her smooth hair gone frizzy.
She vomits her breakfast in the garbage pails on the way to school. “I am thin and I have beautiful bones,” she repeats to herself as she walks, head high, towards the goal of perfection she has fixed for herself. God has spoken to her but she keeps it a secret. One evening, when she is out walking with her younger sister and dying of boredom, the miracle happens. After several calls placed here and there with different friends, she finally reaches Fred, a dealer.
“I just got some good shit in, girls, come on over.”
*
Mrs. Morgenstein, Fred’s mother, is busy ironing. She keeps her eyes on her work. There are clothes scattered all over the place, on sofas, kitchen chairs and beds. Her son paces between the living-room and the basement where he digs into the family freezer. His stash is hidden under the peas and carrots and large roasts of beef.
Often, his more zealous customers follow him to the Botanical Gardens. They try it out in a deserted corner of the park frequented by students from a nearby college, and of course, by the pot heads.
“Get ready, it hits fast. I want to see you get high, girls. You’re about to get real stoned.”
Corinne hands him a ten-dollar bill borrowed from her mother’s wallet. She gets up and sits down immediately. Fred’s mother sprays starch on her husband’s white shirts, a sales representative for an international company.
“Hey, Ma, that stuff smells pretty strong. It’s worse than dope.”
The iron skitters in all directions as if Mrs. Morgenstein has lost control. The steam fills the kitchen and forms clouds over their heads.
Corinne Gilbert has her first apparition. Christ smiles at her. He holds out His arms while murmuring Latin words she has never heard before.
“Well, Corinne, what do you think? You look pretty gone, man,” says Fred.
“Stupid bugger, you made me forget what I was thinking about.”
The vision vanishes as soon as Fred starts to talk and laugh. Despite her efforts, Corinne has lost the image of Christ smiling and asking her to become His disciple. Mrs. Morgenstein goes on ironing. Corinne tells herself that other clouds, other bubbles might form and welcome back the divine apparition.
“Don’t worry about my mother. She doesn’t understand English. We can say what we want.”
Fred’s mother scolds him in a language she doesn’t understand.
Corinne wonders if Mrs. Morgenstein is speaking in the language of Christ. It’s possible, after all, because Jesus was a Jew. Are Jews happier than Catholics?
Corinne has gone to heaven, she is sure of it. Her body has detached itself, she doesn’t feel it anymore.
“Want to go for a little car ride, girls?”
*
The river, at this spot, looks threatening. The banks have been reconfigured since the building of the bridge-tunnel. Fred gives them a detailed story of the construction.
“Do you think you can walk on water, Fred?” asks Corinne.
“With everything I’ve taken, I probably can.”
“Don’t do anything stupid!” Corinne’s sister cries out.
“Watch me, girls, I’m going to give it a try.”
Fred advances into the water with his biker boots.
“Can’t you see you’re not Jesus. You’re sinking instead of levitating. You don’t even believe in God,” says Corinne. “You look like the devil incarnate.”
Despite the girls’ screams, Fred sinks in over his head and disappears in a few seconds. Corinne stays on the bank while her sister runs to the nearest house for help.
The rescuers arrive and a few people gather on the bank to watch. The policemen take the girls to a nearby bench. They question them about what has happened. The divers are already raking the perimeter of the presumed drowning.
Corinne Gilbert kneels down and prays. She asks that Fred’s life be saved. Alone, surrounded by gawking onlookers, she is suffused with the familiar warm feelings.
Afraid of being seen by the police swarming all over the bank, Fred slips on an extra pair of pants and his Hawaian shirt. He mustn’t take any chances. His route is strewn with bystanders.
Mrs. Morgenstein hasn’t moved, the iron is still sliding in all directions, the steam clouds have thickened.
“Well, if it isn’t Houdini himself! One of these days you’ll get caught.”
Corinne Gilbert has stopped praying. She and her sister are escorted home by the police.
Monsieur George
On Friday nights, Monsieur George accompanies his flower-girls on their weekly rounds of the city’s restaurants. While they are selling flowers, he is busy calculating his profits. His van even looks like him. He no longer bothers to buckle up his safety belt because it puts him into a state of permanent discomfort.
The back seats have been replaced by buckets of flowers. There is a kind of mortuary atmosphere in the van. The girls have to thread their way between the buckets in an effort to find a place to sit. Monsieur George insists upon a uniform, a red cape with a hood that matches their black stockings.
“We’ve got a lot of flowers to sell tonight, girls.”
Most of them sigh, except for Melanie. She is proud to work for Monsieur George despite his obvious lack of manners. He often picks at his nose in the van and is constantly prodding his genitals.
“The girls can’t stand that,” Nathalie, the most forward one of the bunch, often tells him.
Melanie is not put off by bad manners. On the contrary, she is so bored at home with her parents that she looks forward to these outings, made more exciting by their forays into bars and restaurants. She has nothing against Monsieur George. Sometimes, he speaks in a language she doesn’t understand. He orders dishes at his friend’s restaurant that she wouldn’t dream of tasting even if they paid her. Once, after making their usual rounds downtown and in Old Montreal, Monsieur George invites the girls to dinner. There is practically nothing but fish on the menu, dishes that Melanie had never heard of.
“I’m telling you it’s good,” says Monsieur George, patting her on the back. “Order eggplant with minced meat. You’ll see, it’s just like your shepherd’s pie.”
He and his friend glance at each other – accomplices. Melanie doesn’t know any foreign languages, but she understands sign language and body language pretty well. Secret languages have held no mystery for her since childhood.
After the bars close, she rides home in Monsieur George’ van. To get into the house, she has to switch the light on and off. The effect is as startling as the piercing light of a projector.
She is the only one who can hear anything in the house. Her parents dwell in a world that she used to share with them not so long ago. But recently they let her have the keys to the house. She is her parents’ guardian, mother to her mother, mother to her father. No brother or sister round out the family picture unless you count the menagerie: a parrot, two dogs and a rabbit who lives on the edge of the living-room. The animals line up in the hall at any hour of the day or night to see if Melanie has a surprise for them – leftovers from supper, objects found in the night, pats or conversations until dawn.
The flower-girls choose minced meat with eggplant called moussaka by Monsieur George’s friends.
“Fabulous,” confides Nathalie to Carla, who is seated to her right.
After the meal, the men dance, holding one another by the shoulders.
“What a strange ritual,” thinks Melanie. “These men dance with each other like women.”
The restaurant, now closed, is open only to friends. The ouzo is flowing. Vera, another flowergirl, is about to take advantage of the situation. She takes a catalogue of Avon products out of her bag.
“Help me out, guys, a thought for your little women who are all alone at home, they deserve something.”
Monsieur George, in a sudden gesture of kindness, asks Vera to choose a gift for each of his flower-girls, and he will pay the whole shot. The catalogue circulates while the men go back and forth between the ouzo and the dance floor. Vera spends the rest of the night filling out order forms.
Melanie’s parents have already finished their breakfast. The box of Froot Loops is still on the table. The mother grabs Melanie by the arm. Her father turns off his hearing-aid and seeks refuge in the living-room. Blood-curdling screams fill the bungalow built in the middle of what used to be a wasteland. Today, you can hardly see the sky.
The flower-girl promises her mother she will work only in shopping centres. This promise is not enough to reassure her mother who has been worried ever since her daughter started to talk like the other girls her age.
She re-integrates her parents’ world, where silence reigns. What she knows about them can be summed up in a few words. They met in a rehab centre, they married late. When she was born, they learned that she wouldn’t be like them, that she’d get ahead in life.
*
Monsieur George, standing stiffly in his suit, looks his protégée in the eye. He can’t believe what is happening.
“You can’t do that to me, Mel! I need you, and so do the other girls. It’s no good in shopping-centres. Old people don’t buy flowers. They’re too poor.”
“It’s true, Melanie,” Vera adds, “your parents survive because of the money you earn, they can’t do that to you.”
“My mind is made up. I won’t be here tonight,” says Melanie.
Her outfit as a flower-girl, washed and carefully ironed, is suspended from a hanger in Monsieur George’s van.
“You can keep the outfit and reimburse me. And you owe me money for the flower deposit, the restaurants, and your share of the gas…”
“I think you’re exaggerating, Mr. George. You can take me to Small Claims Court, I don’t give a damn.”
Their confrontation destabilizes the group. Some of the girls refuse to do the rounds. Tonight’s list of complaints isn’t the usual one: too many working-hours, low pay, harassment from Monsieur George’s friends. This time, it’s actually happening, one of the girls is leaving the group. At the school for the deaf, the teachers taught her to live in a world without envying normal people. Her colleagues see her off with regret in their voices.
Melanie removes her hearing-aid. She returns to the world of light.
Female
To P.H., to J.-S. H.
I’m glad we were able to rent this old farmhouse for only a few dollars, even though we have to paint the rooms on the second floor to compensate for the low rent.
I can’t stand the city in summer.
Out here, the plain stretches indefinitely, swallowed up in a whirl of blue and yellow. There’s nothing to trouble our minds, nothing. If I were an artist surrounded by so much beauty I’d cut my ear off, but I know nothing about mixing colours, the secrets of pigments and the euphoria of the artist. So much space makes me anxious, and sometimes I have to blow into a brown paper bag to free up the alveoli of my lungs. The cows look at me stupidly. When I go and talk to them, they charge me as if I wanted to harm them. One of the previous renters was hit by a tornado in the middle of July. The roof and the back balcony blew off.
The farmers in the area work from morning till night. Marcel, our neighbour, lives alone in a big house ever since his wife left him for a guy in the city.
“She was lonely. I can’t see what she finds in the city that she can’t find here. Museums, bookstores, the arts – that’s not what she wants. She likes comfort: washing-machine, dryer, dishwasher, a home entertainment system. She didn’t even want to take the TV that was in her room,” he confided in us, with his eyes all watery.
On Sundays, he takes a holiday from working in the fields and heads straight for the only bar in the village, the one time in the week that he allows himself to live his “man’s life,” as he likes to call it.
Since his wife left him, he has to see to everything. At least, that’s what he says.
That is why I offered to do his washing and his ironing. It was a chance to use his appliances because we don’t have any. Michel didn’t agree. He threw a fit of jealousy the first time I walked in with the neighbour’s ironing. He went out to the barn with the children and they played with his paints and brushes. By suppertime, the storm clouds had dispersed. And I had time to take the ironing back to the farmer’s.
Michel built a cabin for the children. Because there were no trees strong enough to support the structure, he installed a platform just in front of the barn. Our neighbour offered to help him, but Michel didn’t appreciate the offer. Often, I see the farmer coming and going on his tractor, he waves when he sees me in the distance. Once, he even mistook Michel for me, which did nothing to improve the relationship between the two men.
A month after our arrival, Marcel asked me what had attracted me to Michel, a man without a job, without a future, who painted pictures to earn his living. I should be more concerned about my children, he said to me, and about offering them the best. With these words, he took two beers out of the fridge, sat down beside me, and watched me while I ironed and folded underpants – mine, his and my boyfriend’s.
I know (because Michel’s sister told me before leaving town) that he tried to pick up Michel’s mother and his sister Roxanne. His father decided to avoid Sainte-Marcelline as long as Marcel was there. The house is for sale for a ridiculous price, but as Michel’s and Roxanne’s father says, it has a hidden defect.
When I come back to the house, I decide to cancel my arrangement with our neighbour. The village laundromat will have to do for the last few weeks of our holidays. While Mrs. Carreau is attending to our washing, I go off and check out the garage sales along the back roads. I buy a mannequin’s head, an old ventilator and small objects that are easy to transport. People find me crazy to load up with all this stuff. On the concession roads, I turn the radio and air-conditioning on full blast. I don’t always bring lunch with me.
The story of the farmer doesn’t stop there. On the contrary. One day, I ask him to repair the stove that Michel can’t get working. Mice have gnawed through the wires of the electric panel. He redoes the wiring and doesn’t charge us anything.
“Here we go again,” says Michel. “We’ve just run up a new debt with him.”
He couldn’t sleep that night thinking about it. I couldn’t either, but for an entirely different reason: the mice. A few years ago, they moved in, lock, stock and barrel. They resent the presence of the occasional renters. And they show it. Soon, they’re eating our food. In the cupboards, the Oreo cookies, Chunky chocolate, chips, the bread, sugar and flour are already half eaten. Only the canned goods are still intact.
The second week, when I go for the laundry, Mrs. Carreau looks very surprised. She tells me that my husband has already picked it up. How did Michel manage to carry three bags of laundry on his bicycle back to the house? I ask her for a description of my husband (in reality, more of a lover than a husband) and it corresponds to that of my neighbour. I am livid.
When I get home, the three bags are plunked down in front of the main door that hasn’t been used for years. Michel is too busy with his building and hadn’t noticed the farmer drop them off. I lay out the clothes in little piles. After a while, I notice that some of my things are missing: bra, underpants, my old pyjamas full of holes and my Speedo swimsuit. I had had a premonition this would happen one day.
We spend the rest of the summer picking up mice excrement. We paint the rooms on the second floor green and yellow so that the indoors and the outdoors will meld. Maybe the cows will feel like moving in, and evict the mice.
Towards the end of the afternoon, we take the children to the sand pit where an artificial lake has been dug. In the evening, I put the family’s clothes to soak in the bathtub. Michel sets up a clothesline between two electricity poles.
It’s early morning, and the clothes are flapping in the wind. They create strange paintings. The brilliant splotches of colour keep shifting the depth of field. We have fun playing at shadow puppets behind the sheets. The wind invents dialogues that we answer. The children have transformed their cabin into an observation post; they set traps for the animals of the farm next door, especially the females. They think the poor creatures will offer them their young. Marcel has disappeared into the fields like a mercenary of the harvest. He probably won’t be back before the end of summer, or in the autumn. I don’t know if he has decided to wash his own clothes.
Sometimes, in the evening, I think I see him behind the sheets.
“Mummy! Are those sheets ghosts?”
I buy myself an entire wardrobe of underwear at the flea market in the next village. I embroider my initials on each article of clothing.
A friend from the city, also eager to escape the heat, arrives on a bicycle, with a tent tucked under her arm which she proceeds to pitch in front of the house. She says she is biking around the countryside to try to lose weight. In the evenings, she likes to write down farfetched stories that help her fall asleep. Despite our repeated invitations to use the living-room at night, she tells us she prefers to sleep in the tent. Before returning to her makeshift shelter, she recounts some haunting stories, and talks about her trips around the countryside. After we have polished off four bottles of wine, I forget all about Marcel, the mice and the resident ghosts. When Michel’s parents bought the house, a man and a woman were living here with a baby barely a year old. He would wander around in his diapers, even in the winter when the heating was on the blink. They left without paying the rent or the arrears. When I can’t sleep, I see a baby crawling around, coming up to the fireplace. He spits out his pacifier that has turned into an icicle.
The second night, my friend comes in at a run. She asks if she can sleep on the second floor that we are fixing up. She dreamt that a farmer and an animal were making shadow puppets outside the tent. The next morning, she leaves for a new destination, scared off.
Mrs. Carreau’s husband is a baker as well as the owner of the laundromat. Once a week he travels the concession roads selling his goods out of his van. This morning, Michel and the children run out and crowd around the desserts. I look after the bread and the croissants. When we get down from the van, the baker hands me a white plastic bag.
“My wife found this among the lost objects in the laundromat, she says it’s yours.”
The underclothes, the pyjamas and the swimsuit – they’re all there. I’m relieved, and intrigued. Through the window, I can see Marcel’s silhouette. He is on his tractor, stark naked. He waves to me.
Grotto
Towards nine o’clock every morning, Mrs. Ritti, wearing a nightie and her sunglasses, shakes out her mop. One day, when she was looking for her husband, I was able to speak with her. It was the first and only time. The conversation lasted half an hour. She was speaking Italian and I was speaking English.
She came into the house. “Excuse me, Signora, but I’m looking for Ricky.” She called him several times for supper. I told her gently that Ricky must be at work. Lifting her eyes, she looked at me and shouted: “There was a break-in, they took a lot of jewellery and gold.” I asked her if she had called the police. “No,” she answered, furious, “because it’s much worse here than the police.”.”
That winter, I wasn’t doing much apart from sitting at the window, observing the squirrels and trying to look after myself. Sometimes I would see her, but she wouldn’t see me. She would go out and come back several hours later with a bag from The Bay. Her clothes always clashed with her activities. They seemed to hark back to another time in her life when she had been happy. For instance, she would mow the grass in her pyjamas. Or go to the cleaner’s in an old evening gown.
On the day she was looking for her husband, she came back twice to ask me for my telephone number, and to give me a letter addressed to her husband. That is how I discovered her name. She had the bluest eyes. In the phone book, there were only three entries under that name. She must have felt terribly alone. I jotted down her number and stuck it on the fridge. That evening, when I saw her son arrive, I telephoned him.
“We will look into the matter,” he answered drily, as if I were a dissatisfied customer returning an article of clothing.
I insisted that it could be dangerous leaving her alone all day. I could hear Mrs. Ritti scream at her son in English to hang up.
The next day I went to my help group. The meetings were held above a drugstore next to a kung-fu centre. Our sessions were punctuated by the blows and shouts of the apprentice warriors. My job was to make sure that the coffee pot was switched on.
*
In the summer, she would sit on the balcony after her housework was done and stare at the house next to ours. Several times, I waved to her without getting a reaction. At Hallowe’en, she hung a witch on the front of their house. When her son came home, he removed it. A few weeks before Christmas, she spent a lot of time installing illuminated pine boughs on the ramp of the outdoor staircase. I tried to approach her again, unsuccessfully. Right after the holidays, her husband and her son-in-law, snickering, chucked the pine tree into the snow with all its decorations and wreaths.
Last summer she took a turn for the worse. I had hired workmen to redo the cornices of the house. She insulted them in three languages, telling them to return to where they came from.
I crossed the street to calm her down. She started shouting while briskly sweeping the entrance of the garage. She wasn’t wearing her glasses. Her large blue eyes were fixed at some vague point above my head. She asked me if I was deaf, and then answered for me, saying that I was too young to be afflicted with such a disability.
Her neighbour, who is at least eighty years old, came over to tell me not to pay any attention to her. In the meantime, Mrs. Ritti disappeared into her garden. I learned that she and her husband had lived in the neighbourhood for twenty years. None of their immediate neighbours ever spoke to them. I had always wondered why they snubbed her.
“She has problems,” said a neighbour, “serious problems. You know, she’s already been committed.”
You can’t shut people out under the pretext that they are not good neighbours and that they have a grotto on their lawn with a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Later that evening, her daughter arrived driving a Mazda convertible sports car. She rang the doorbell several times. Since the Christmas tree incident, the son-in-law would wait in the car while his wife visited her parents. She finally took a bunch of keys out of her pocket and went in. The lights were all on as if it were Christmas. The father came out. He spent the rest of the evening seated on the steps. Around ten o’clock, the mother also came out, and knelt down in front of the Virgin’s grotto. She shouted the words of a prayer, made the sign of the cross on her mouth, ears and forehead. Red and white votive lights were flickering on the sad face of the Lady in blue.
Her husband, impassive, remained leaning against the railing. When she stopped shouting, two policemen arrived in front of the house that was lit up like a Christmas tree. I observed the scene from behind the curtains. To my surprise, they didn’t take her away with them.
That same evening, I went to my meeting. It was so hot above the drugstore that we had to leave the door half open. The kung-fu masters were busy tending to their bodies, and we to our souls.
*
A few weeks later, a real estate agent put up a House for Sale sign on their lawn in front of the Our Lady of Fatima grotto. I phoned the number on the poster: “A very well-maintained house, the bathroom and the kitchen have been renovated. Everything is very clean,” said the agent. I asked the price and hung up.
The husband, whom I shall call Marcello because of his resemblance to the Fellini actor, was constantly working: windows, grounds, the garage entrance, garbage, the whole house was being gone over with a fine-tooth comb, evenings and weekends. I could hear his wife scream at him that he was lazy.
Early in the spring, the agent stuck Sold on the sign. The following day, the woman left the house with a suitcase and a green bag. Her son was holding her by the arm. She was wearing her large black sunglasses and a strange hat. I didn’t see her again until the move.
The two men organized a garage sale. The son brought his furniture out of the basement. He recreated his bachelor’s environment on the sidewalk. Installed on his lazy-boy chair, he passed out information to the people interested in buying.
The sale lasted two days and the move lasted ten. By car and on foot, Marcello and his son transported objects and half-packed clothes. On the tenth day, a truck from Fashion City pulled up to the door. The movers brought out furniture carefully wrapped in white slipcovers. Mrs. Ritti, my erstwhile neighbour, arrived on a bicycle just as the truck driver was closing the door. Marcello made the sign of the cross. She went into the grotto with the squirrels and never came out again.
Corinne Gilbert’s Daughter
Corinne Gilbert’s wish was granted. Her daughter was conceived through the good offices of the Holy Spirit. There was no penetration. Her daughter claims that her parents never really wanted her. I think there is some truth to what she proclaims loud and clear. Maybe that is why she became a junkie.
Whatever the reason, we have been living in this semi-basement for a few months. The apartment is so damp that some of Ariane’s clothes have grown mould in the back of the cupboard. This detail doesn’t seem to bother her. There are four mattresses in the main room: the bare necessities for eating, sleeping and getting high. Instead of curtains, we lean mattresses against the windows. As I come to more often than Ariane, I’m more aware of the mess and dirt everywhere: pizza cartons piled on the kitchen counter, the recycling box full of torn and dirty clothes. We have no more phone or electricity and are two months behind in the rent. But who cares? The neighbour offered to connect us to his meter, but this seemed too risky an enterprise considering my condition.
I like the feeling of desolation that reigns here. Sometimes, on the walls, we draw the stories that haunt us when we are high. Ariane’s are about dreams that slide down the walls into the cracks of the baseboards that are thick with coats of old blistering paint, dried blood and other foreign matter. Her fingers, black with China ink, twirl over the walls creating strange characters, heroes of adventures that have neither beginning nor end, and whose sole interest resides in the singularity of their attributes.
Soon, we will go looking for a new place to hide. We might have to split up for a while. Ariane suggested that we have two addresses which would help us access more financial resources. I can’t remember exactly how I met the person who is accompanying me on this descent into hell. More often than not, when one of us decides to beg in the street, we scrape enough together to allow us to drink. We thought of getting a dog to accompany us in our wanderings.
“We’d have to steal one,” said Ariane, “or find a kind soul who’d give us one as a present.”
Not an original idea when you think of all the people who beg with a cat, or even a parrot in a cage. We’ll trust fate and serendipity because competition is fierce out there and everyone has their own strategy. For example, the other day we were moved at the sight of a musician singing with his child, preventing the child from being in daycare. One of Ariane’s friends, who gave birth to a little boy barely a month ago, wanders around the Crémazie subway entrance with her newborn. I don’t think Ariane would lend herself to the maternity game because of the circumstances surrounding her own arrival into this world.
We’ve made up our minds. Ariane will spend time in a shelter for young people. She’ll receive her welfare benefits and I will figure out a way to get invited by friends. The only problem is Ariane’s drug consumption: she can’t go without heroin. And if she doesn’t toe the line, she’ll get thrown out.
I ask a doctor friend (who lost his licence when the Order of Physicians discovered that he had falsified prescriptions) how much time Ariane and I have to live. He shakes his head for an answer. As it is, he is reduced to filching his own supply in clinics. He was condemned to two years in prison for a break-and-enter. But his stay didn’t cure him. I also take the opportunity to ask him about pregnancies like Corinne’s in which the Holy Ghost had intervened. He pursed his lips. Any reason is good enough to sever ties with one’s parents. He knows Ariane’s mother well. When he was working at police headquarters, he had examined her after a raid on an illegal bar. She was in a terrible state, and suspected of having stolen prescription drugs. He saw her again on several occasions when he went over to the other side, as he puts it. He practiced medicine in his own way, took care of those who wouldn’t go to hospital. She had consulted him about an abortion. After the operation, she would drop in at his office without an appointment and ask for drugs, pretending to suffer from insomnia and concentration problems. Then he lost track of her for several months. One evening, she arrived crying, begging him to give her an abortion. He refused. She had no money to pay him.
His story (was it true?) threw light on how Ariane sees her life ever since we started going out together. What was she like before? It’s like asking if there is life after death or if she drank enough milk as a teenager.
*
Ariane, who has forced herself not to work, uses the walls or her body as a canvas. I watch over her because she tends to mutilate herself, and to do it as if she were putting on a show. The first time she performed in a bar – she likes to call it perform – her hands were travelling back and forth over her arms with a razor blade. Sometimes she would hold the instrument in her mouth and would examine her arms under the light. When I asked her after the show if she was in pain, she looked exasperated. She confessed to me later that she had had a bad impression of me, and thought I was one of those guys who comes to the place for the wrong reasons. Afterwards we exchanged our respective practices, I with magic and secrets, she with fluids and tattooing. She often says that one day her ecstasies will lead her into oblivion. I agree.
Ariane intends going back to the street if the shelter has nothing to offer her. Right now, she is in the hallway. She is content, pressing her blackened lips to the wall and doesn’t want to be disturbed. She has slept most of the day. She confided to me, when she woke up, that she had dreamed about her father whom she claims not to know but whose silhouette she describes as he appeared to her. Tall, slim, sporting a well-trimmed beard that makes him look older than his age, he goes into the room where she is sleeping, and plants a kiss on her forehead. His gesture awakens her, enough so that she opens her eyes and notices him. And this moment will repeat itself for as long as she can’t make out his face clearly. At times, her father appears in the door or sits at the foot of her bed, leafing through the pages of her baby album where she is photographed with or without her mother in miserable lodgings. These images, shot in fast motion, show her father always wearing the same clothes, and always the same age. My age, it goes without saying.
Publisher Information
Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
Original Title: Histoires saintes
Copyright © 2001, by Carole David and Les Herbes Rouges. Translations © 2005, by Nora Alleyn and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
Antonio D’Alfonso, editor
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004103682
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
David, Carole
Unholy stories / Carole David ; translated by Nora Alleyn. (Prose series ; 72)
ISBN
1-55071-201-2 print
9781550717709 epub
9781550717938 mobi
I. Alleyn, Nora II. Title. III. Series. PS8557.A77U53 2004 C843’.54 C2004-901628-8