Françoise Camirand

Procrastination. A word that’s hard to pronounce. Marcel Proust borrowed it from English, and then popularized it when he made it one of the primary themes of In Search of Lost Time. All writers, essayists, script writers and playwrights are familiar with procrastination, and fall prey to it, except Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Nancy Huston, Stéphane Laporte, Ismail Kadare, and … Françoise Camirand.

She never put off till tomorrow what she could do today. Quite the opposite. She did things today which could easily wait until tomorrow. She was a workhorse, with iron discipline, and she worked three hundred days a year, five or six hours a day, sometimes more, without slacking off. Not counting the time she spent reading up on the subject of the book she was working on.

But for the past two or three days, nothing has been the same on Hutchison Street, at least not in Françoise Camirand’s study and head. Perhaps it was because she had taken a liking to her long walks through the neighbourhood. She paced and protested like a caged lioness.

She would sit down at her desk, take a peek at her computer, make a face, stand up again, grab a coffee to give her energy, survey her plants and trim them (although there were actually no more yellow leaves to pluck off), drink a cup of tea to stimulate the creative juices, look out the window, put on some music, change CDs, turn it off again, then come back to take another peek at her characters. And then the cycle of coffee, tea, plants and looking out the window would start over again.

She was not her usual self. This had not happened to her for a long time. Even more dangerous, her characters seemed both strange and foreign to her. As if all the affinity, fondness and love she had originally felt for them had dissipated. All at once.

Procrastination was turning into discouragement of the worst kind as she lost sight of the importance of her work. She no longer knew why she was writing. Danger! Handle with care! There were too many bad memories associated with this kind of slump.

She even quarrelled with Jean-Hugues. She got worked up. “It was YOUR idea, not mine. If you want to publish an autobiography, write your own and leave me alone!” He walked out and slammed the door. What babies they were! To be honest, she was taking it out on him. Unhappy with her work, she was looking for a fight. She would have picked a fight with the storekeeper, the mailman, anybody, but he happened to be the one. He talked for the sake of talking, the poor guy, he didn’t want to make her do anything. Quite the contrary. He just wanted to talk about Gabrielle Roy’s autobiography, Enchantment and Sorrow, which he was rereading, and he had accidentally let slip the idea that Françoise could write her own biography, nothing more. But this wasn’t the right time to talk about the past, which she had been struggling with for a few days.

She felt distraught, not so much because of the fight with Jean-Hugues – doors had been slammed many times over the years – but because of the terrible feeling that was weighing her down. She was haunted by her younger days, the time before she began writing … As if things were floating, as if everything was becoming foreign, as if life no longer had any texture or meaning. It was a state of mind she feared, because she had been there before. It would be so easy to slip into the cycle of self-destruction once again, it would be the next step … Just because she had changed obsessions, it didn’t mean that she was no longer obsessive. She knew what it was like, to let everything go down the toilet.

After Jean-Hugues left, she was still fuming. She had to do something, before everything went to hell in a handcart! She had to break out of her cell immediately. She took her handbag and went out. Around her, the street was teeming with life. It was like a remedy for her, it helped her to put things into perspective, to get her head screwed on straight, to give herself a kick in the ass. Stagnation is a kind of demon. Move, do something! When she was younger, she would have taken a drink, then another and another. But those days were over now.

Drawing inspiration from one of her favourite songs, Toujours vivant, she decided to grab hold of the lifebuoy.4 It was a song that celebrated making a mark in this world, never giving up. The words echoed in her head. She just muttered them at first. It was a reflex, she sang without much conviction, but she was soon carried away by the song’s ebb and flow. She felt like a fool singing out loud in the middle of the street, but it was a much smaller risk than the one she had just averted. She walked all the way over to Pratt Park, circled it two or three times. She took Fairmount on the way back and rang Jean-Hugues’s doorbell.