Life in the Court of Matane

We acknowledge the support from the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC) and the Government of Quebec tax credit for book publishing administered by SODEC.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada's Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1
   
The Cat (1976)

CHAPTER 2
   
The Brown-Headed Cowbird (1979)

CHAPTER 3
   
The Winkle (1981)

CHAPTER 4
   
The Dog (1980)

CHAPTER 5
   
The Hens (1982)

CHAPTER 6
   
The Great Horned Owl (1983)

EPILOGUE
    
The Canary (1986)

I
turned forty recently
, the age my grandmother was when I came into the world. This made me wonder how I would react if, on a trip back in time, I happened to come across the little boy I once was. I wonder if he would agree to become my friend and, especially, if he would let me be his friend. I very much doubt it. In his eyes, I would have all the flaws his parents had—or at least those he would be able to see on the rare occasions we managed to meet, since I work all the time. He would certainly note my appalling propensity, inherited from my father, to suspect others of being as dumb as a stump. Although we might both like the same music. One thing's for sure: I'd probably get on his nerves, telling him to calm down all the time, insisting that things would work out just fine, that becoming an adult would end many of the torments of childhood. Far from being consoled, he would think I wasn't taking his troubles seriously. In short, I wonder if we would have much in common. His verbosity would annoy me, I'm sure. Plus, I don't like people who live in fear, and this boy was, if memory serves, absolutely terrorized three days out of five. He would have a very strong country accent, too. Concerned for his education, I would correct his pronunciation. He would be offended and end up hating me forever. Perhaps it's for the best that we never did meet.

I puzzled over questions like this for the longest time. In photographs from the 1970s, my feet rooted in the soil of the Gaspé Peninsula, I don't recognize my recollection of how things were. At least, I think I recognize myself, because these photos belong to me, not to someone else. What I mean is that it's only recently that I've managed to feel the slightest empathy for the little boy I used to be. Those years were long. I only know one way to describe what I felt when I understood, at age thirteen, that my childhood was over: at last. At the end of a silty childhood strewn with frustrations, silences, and things we were forced to forget, the trials and tribulations of my teenage years suddenly seemed like light entertainment.

For the longest time, I tried to understand what set me and my sister apart from other people in how we felt about our childhood. I think I have the beginnings of an answer. Very early on, long before other people, we understood that we were all alone. People will say that children live outside an adult world that tolerates them only because they are destined to grow up. Perhaps. But when I look at it like that, I think we're confusing voluntarily cutting yourself off from the adult world with the state of solitude that comes from what I will call—bluntly and for lack of a less shocking, less upsetting term—being abandoned. Sometimes we must resign ourselves to the harshness of vocabulary.

This solitude was revealed to me the day we arrived at the Thénardiers', the family that appears at the very start of this novel. When I began writing these stories, I was going to describe the Thénardiers' world. But a faithful description of all that we went through with that family would have plunged the story into a bottomless pit. My book would have foundered in the cold depths of sadness and commiseration, where the crystal-clear notes of my mother's laughter can no longer be heard. The year 1975-76 was therefore passed over. Looking back on it now, perhaps that story would have helped me reconcile myself with the child I was then. It would, at least, have explained my little earthquakes, a charming expression I owe to the American singer Tori Amos, who sang a song called “Little Earthquakes” in the early 1990s. Its tone, its words, and its severity correspond precisely to the all-too-precise memories I still have of my year with the Thénardiers. The Northern Irish have a euphemism they use whenever they speak of the war that tore their country apart: the Troubles. Each to his own avoidance strategies. I set out with the intention of going beyond euphemisms, of describing the Great Terror, but it was another singer who convinced me to do no such thing. The wonderful Pierre Lapointe's “Pointant le nord” reminded me how important it can be not to say too much. “No, I won't speak,” he keeps singing, like a mantra. I think that, to understand this novel, readers must listen to “Little Earthquakes” and “Pointant le nord.” Both songs might just be the ideal preface to these stories.

Writing this novel allowed me to shut away in the basement the awful beasts that used to lay down the law in my house. Some nights, I can hear them wheezing and sighing through the floorboards. One day, out of respect for the nomadic ways my childhood taught me, I will move out of this house, perhaps even away from this city. I fully intend to leave those beasts right where they are. I don't want anyone else to see me walking them around on a leash through the streets, like children dragged along behind dogs that are too big for them. They will die of tiredness and old age, on their last legs.

My sister and I will keep on laughing like Micheline Raymond, professional cook.

“How will you convey the memories without the resentment?”

“I don't plan to.”

J
uly 1976. Montreal
. The 21st Olympic Games. A tiny Romanian gymnast stands on a mat and waves to the crowd. For thirty seconds, she swings back and forth between two wooden bars, defying the laws of gravity. Her landing is perfect. She even manages a smile, and gambols away from the blue mat as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. With the whole world looking on, she gets a perfect score. Ten. Nadia Comaneci, the child who had been getting by on an egg a day, had just revealed to Quebec's metropolis the possibilities of weightlessness. Of this impressive demonstration of grace, courage, and agility, history would remember her smile most of all—the one thing she hadn't worked on and that came to her naturally. If you walk by the Olympic Stadium in Montreal today, you'll see a monument in honour of the medal winners at the Montreal Olympics. You can't miss it. It's right by the entrance to the Biodome. Look for Nadia's name among all the others. Look up and you'll see the Romanian flag. I remember it like it were yesterday.

That summer, Radio-Canada changed its schedule so we could watch the Romanian angel fly beneath the flashbulbs. In 1976, thousands of Quebec babies were named Nadia in memory of this visit by grace personified to Montreal. Her Holiness wore a white leotard with two blue stripes down the side. On the other side of the screen, 450 kilometres east of Montreal, sprawled on an orange and yellow shag carpet, my sister and I watched Nadia perform the feats that we would later practice on our very own uneven bars: our father and mother. So, it all began with that little Romanian cat.

I've said it once, but I'll say it again: Our mother—the lower bar—loved her children, Elvis Presley, and cats (and had an impressive collection of the latter). Our father—the upper bar—loved his children, Jacques Brel, and women (and had an impressive collection of the latter). From a very young age, I knew that
Love Me Tender
and
Ne me quitte pas
were just two versions of the same song. Our mother could find intelligence in a barking dog. Our father saw stupidity in every living thing. Our mother would consult the oracles to see what the future held. Our father would regularly make a clean sweep of his life and start over. Unlike our mother, our father was always itching for a fight. In our largely federalist village, he would fly the Quebec flag in front of our house. Whenever the priest visited the parish, he would wait for him, just to send him packing. He tried to grow tomatoes on the Gaspé Peninsula. In Spanish literature, he would have travelled on a donkey and battled windmills to the death. My mother conjugated verbs in the past that my father knew only in the future. My parents epitomized Quebec society in the 1970s. Sedentary yet nomadic. Yin and yang. First inseparable, then alternating with each other, these uneven bars once rent asunder by the Family Court would never meet again. My sister and I, the two children condemned to swing back and forth between them, put on an admirable display of family gymnastics for all the world to see.

In old photos from the 70s, my father looks a little like Jack Kerouac, with the indefinable charm of a man on the road. The rebel in search of a cause. He had made separatism a way of life. As far as I know, he remains the only person who managed total separation from everything. The day he no longer had children or a wife or a country to separate from, he started drinking to separate from himself. To his parents' despair, my father became the family's version of Elizabeth Taylor; or to put it more accurately, imagine a wholly convincing reincarnation of Henry VIII, King of England. Our mother, a believer faithful to the teachings of the Holy Catholic Church, was kept from the throne by various ruses and can well be imagined as Catherine of Aragon, the forlorn first wife of a king who wasn't going to be pushed around by some pope or other and who collected wives like others collect cars. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr filed through the king's life, with unconvincing cameos from a series of mistresses in between. And these are only some of the highlights from the remarkable skirt-chasing contest that became my father's life. My sister and I occasionally look back on the past, using these women as milestones. “Do you remember? We were still under the reign of Jane Seymour in August 1986.” All the forests in Canada will never produce enough paper to adequately recount the king's love life. And even with what remains of my life, I would still run out of time before I could ever do it justice.

Our father, a police officer, was called up to protect the royal family at the Olympic Games in Montreal. My sister and I stayed in Rivière-du-Loup by the St. Lawrence with Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife. It was just after the Great Terror and just before the Great Upheaval. The Great Terror was the year of 1975–76 when my sister and I lost our grasp on the two uneven bars. For the entire year, we hurtled through the sky high above Rivière-du-Loup, with nothing to hold on to, in total free fall. That's what we were: children in free fall. We had been put in the care of a family whose name now escapes me—proof that forgetting can be a blessing—and whom we shall call, for the purpose in hand, the Thénardiers. Anyone in any doubt about what they were like need look no further than Victor Hugo. All I will say about this miserable experience with the social services is that, in the right hands, the guillotine so loved by the French can be an instrument of peace.

This is more or less what happened. When we came back from three years in Amqui, we lived by the river in an apartment in Notre-Dame-du-Portage, with a cat. Then the cat went off to hunt other mice, leaving us alone with our mother. After that, we moved into a filthy apartment with a rock-filled garden littered with old electronics equipment. Here and there lay a disembowelled television, bits and pieces of a radio, and broken glass we had to skip around while we played. Sometimes my mother stood on the rickety balcony and smoked, staring at the road, a cat at her feet. A police car raced by. Her breathing quickened as she squinted to see who was at the wheel. “Did you see if that was your father?” she asked hopefully. We couldn't tell. The road was too far away. And she would go on staring off in the direction the police car had disappeared.

One day when we found ourselves looking into an empty refrigerator, our mother brought us to the Thénardiers, whom she had found by placing an ad in the paper, and left us there while she went off to earn the money they took for looking after us. When she could no longer pay, she gave them her home, piece by piece. Almost nothing was spared: her mother's sewing machine, coats, cutlery, the dishes. We stayed there for a year until Henry VIII—on the orders of his father, who could barely contain his annoyance—came to bring us to live with him and Anne Boleyn. And that is how we wound up in a trailer in Parc de l'Amitié in Notre-Dame-du-Portage. It could have been worse, you have to admit. Why do you sigh, sister?

And so it was on the orders of another uniform that Henry VIII set off for the Olympic Games in Montreal in the summer of 1976. He would be gone for three weeks, long enough for everyone to swim, run, punch, throw, jump, shoot, pedal, and dive for all they were worth. Showing repeat broadcasts of the Olympics had forced Radio-Canada to rejig its schedule. As a result,
Heidi
, the popular Japanese cartoon, was cancelled. At the time, Canadian public television considered it more worthwhile to watch in awe as an underfed Romanian gymnast did her routine than to fret over the fate of a little cheese-stuffed Swiss girl having a nervous breakdown in Frankfurt. We felt let down by our country and could perfectly understand Henry VIII's and Anne Boleyn's desire to be rid of it as quickly as possible. Canada was clearly out of touch with its people. Sensing us lost in front of the television screen that no longer held us in its thrall, Anne Boleyn found a way to interest us in the Games. (She had no way of knowing that Quebec's revenue ministry would leave them indelibly printed on our minds: As I write this in November 2006, the government has announced that it has just finished paying off Montreal's Olympic Stadium.) Anne Boleyn told us with a laugh that the king was at the Olympics, and that we might very well see him on our colour screen. Between the hundred-metre sprints and the javelin throw, my sister and I kept an eye out for him. My money was on a running race; my sister was convinced he would be at the pool. But we were both sure we wouldn't see him anywhere near a boxing ring or a judo mat. That would have been against his nature. The king wouldn't have hurt a fly. Well, not deliberately, anyway. True to form, he would most likely have asked the fly out to dinner. He would have been charming at first. Then, as the bottles began to empty, he would have ignored her. And once he was well liquored up, he would have insulted her more and more cruelly, until she died of a broken heart with one last buzz of her wings. I have to say my father left no one indifferent. He had chutzpah in spades. Which is probably why he was sent to protect Britain's royal family at the Montreal Olympics. And of this Olympian assignment there remains one anecdote I love to tell anyone who will listen. It never fails to bring a smile to my face.

Princess Anne and her horse were taking part in the equestrian events. There's no security without the police, and back then there was no police without Henry VIII. We're talking about Quebec six years after the October Crisis, after all. It wouldn't do to find the queen's head impaled atop a fir tree in the Quebec forest. To get to the equestrian village you passed through a gate guarded by three uniformed men: a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a soldier from the Canadian army, and a police officer from the Sûreté du Québec. Keeping guard over the equestrian village was far from exciting. All they had to do was make sure that no unauthorized visitors made their way into the part of the village reserved for the Windsors. Idle and bored, the three young men were sitting smoking on a bench, chatting about the news and generally waiting for something to happen. Suddenly, a woman with shapely thighs clad in riding breeches appeared. As she walked past, the Mountie and soldier jumped up and stood to attention, while my father sat where he was and polished off his cigarette. The lady cast an amused look at the ill-mannered police officer who continued to ogle her. He smiled at her. She went on her way. As soon as she was out of sight, the Mountie flew into a rage at him. “What the hell! Do you have any idea who that was?” My father hadn't the faintest idea who the magnificent set of thighs might belong to. “No, who was it?” he asked, crushing his cigarette stub with his shoe. “That was Princess Anne,” the officer spluttered. My father smiled and said out loud what was now clear to all: the queen's daughter sure had a nice pair of thighs on her. I wonder if the princess, while stifling a yawn during another of her mother's speeches, ever casts her mind back to the ill-mannered oaf from Canada who once undressed her with his eyes like no Briton had ever dared. While Henry VIII was drooling over the generous hams of an English princess, I was busy wondering how the frail body of Nadia Comaneci could possibly withstand the repeated hammering against the uneven bars. But it's our own royal family we should be talking about here.

Catherine of Aragon. My mother. My mother's real name was actually Micheline Raymond. She was a professional cook.

Back then we lived in Rivière-du-Loup with Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the king's second wife. The Great Terror was behind us. We won't talk about that. We agreed to talk about something else. And I'm not really allowed to tell you about it anyway. Maman would come pick us up every Sunday to spend the day with her. We would set off in her Renault 5 for a perfect day, leaving all the recommendations of
Canada's Food Guide
far behind us. It was fries, hamburgers, spruce beer, and Gérard Lenorman all the way. I remember the song about the sad dolphin so clearly. I learned it by heart, you know. I used to sing it for my mother, who would help me out with the longer verses. Hang on a sec, I can still remember a bit of it.

Toi, la petite Anglaise, tu rases les falaises, tu n'oses plus comme l'année dernière, me grimper sur le dos comme sur ta moto, courir après les chevaux de la mer…

All three of us would stare at the river from the Renault 5 as we ate our fries and listened to Gérard Lenorman. So long as we were with my mother, the watery sun of eastern Quebec was almost enough to warm us up. You're never cold when you're laughing. The whales of the St. Lawrence swim up this far to give birth and feed their little ones. And every year hordes of tourists arrive from France and Germany to take in the show that my mother treated us to for free, complete with musical accompaniment.

There is a place in Rivière-du-Loup that God created just to make children happy. It's called the Point, a thin strip of land that juts out into the St. Lawrence. A narrow road runs up and down either side. The Point is on the other side of a steep hill. Where the Point begins there used to stand a small white house that served flat, round burgers barely thicker than a cookie, which meant that you had to eat two to even begin to feel full. Micheline Raymond would pull up in her car. Relish and mustard for me, relish and ketchup for my sister, and mountains—Himalayas—of fries all around. As part of a carefully choreographed Sunday ritual, she would give us the burger, which we would take in our left hand, our right hand underneath, and would proceed to eat while sitting on a picnic table, in silence, without chewing, letting it slide down our throats so as not to break apart the flesh. She would then dish out the fries in forgiveness of all past sins. These tiny hamburgers have since been replaced by other, bigger ones, each containing half a cow. Then we would drive the Renault 5 toward the broad, green river. The road hugged a rocky headland, which in one particular spot looked vaguely like the head of an Indian chief. Feathers and war paint had been daubed onto the rock in bright colours so that it was clear for all to see that it was indeed the head of an Indian looking out over the vast St. Lawrence River. The head commanded respect, fear, and admiration. But the rock had been given its name on the most arbitrary of principles. I drove past it last summer and thought it would only have taken a different lick of paint for it to be called “The Bunch of Grapes” or “The Locomotive.” At the end of the Point, the Saint-Siméon ferry berthed at a long wharf. From the mouth of this white beast cars would pour forth from elsewhere, from the water, from the sea, from somewhere on the North Shore. On the other side of the Point, the north side, we discovered a huge cardboard castle, complete with towers, right out of the Middle Ages.