Françoise Camirand

She had just bumped into Ron Kowalski. The one she had nicknamed “the free electron” had become just that, at his own expense. He would detach himself, he would split in two. She couldn’t figure him out. First of all, she had pictured him clearly, but then, as she was writing about him, other people she had known in the past became superimposed on him and cluttered up the path she had taken.

There were more and more people like Ron Kowalski in Montreal and everywhere in the world. Young and old. Migrants, here and elsewhere, born in Poland, Italy, Israel, or in Montreal, Saint-Léonard or Baie-Comeau. It didn’t matter where, these people are from nowhere.

A person can be a composite, but how could she make him into a unified person, someone like him who was fundamentally ineffable?

She had seen him several times, sometimes years apart. She had not forgotten him, but who could forget him? Then, recently, she saw him twice on Hutchison Street and once at the corner grocery store. He had almost not aged, he looked good and had a certain charisma. He had a good quality leather bag on his shoulder, he was well dressed and he carried himself well, but he couldn’t stand still. He shifted from foot to foot, and looked ready to move right or left or straight ahead, it didn’t matter, he just looked ready to pounce.

Ron Kowalski is the kind of person who in real life already looks like a fictional character. Whenever he walks into a place, people notice him. With sweeping gestures, a smirk on his face, he goes from one language to another with no hesitation and with no accent that reveals where he comes from. When he’s standing up, he looks alert, when he’s sitting down, he’s always slouching and when he’s smiling, it’s to charm us to death. The only time you see the child in him is when he’s laughing.

Françoise saw him burst out laughing in the grocery store when the oranges started to roll off the display case. No one was able to keep the oranges from falling off the shelf, not even him. When she heard him laugh like a bird cooing and saw him with his arms outstretched, she knew that he would become a character in her novel.

What enchanted her as much as his smile was the bond that formed immediately between Ron Kowalski and Jeannot Paterson, the store’s lowly employee. All of a sudden, they started up a conversation with each other. Which was surprising, to say the least, since Jeannot Paterson was not making the inarticulate sounds he usually did. He was actually talking. He switched from English to French, just like Ron. It was the very first time that Françoise heard Jeannot’s voice, and it occurred to her that Ron Kowalski must be a magician as well as a free electron.