Life in the Court of Matane (7 page)

A ghostly cat haunted the corridors of the court of King Henry VIII. The TV images of the Moscow Olympic Games showed a heftier Nadia, no longer as light as air. She had to settle for silver in the overall standings and didn't make the podium in the uneven bars. It's a demanding sport. You can't keep doing it for very long: sooner or later the body's natural development gets in the way of its movements and affects its performance.

But for a while our graceful performances on the uneven bars were of the highest calibre. I like to pretend that, just like Nadia, we got full marks for our landing on this northern beach. But marks often depend on judges who, as we all know, can sometimes be unpredictable.

I wonder if they remember the days when our laughing annoyed them so much they couldn't stand it any longer. I want my sister to laugh like that the day they bury me in the cemetery in Rivière-du-Loup. At the top of the hill overlooking the St. Lawrence. My mind is made up. Anywhere else would be unbearable. She'll lay me to rest beside my mother, with “Here lies Eric Dupont, son of Micheline Raymond, professional cook.
Vergeblich
” as an epitaph. With a little luck, she'll hear me laugh really, really loudly. Loud enough for another chunk of the Indian's head to fall onto the road and stop in its tracks a whale that has just had two ribs torn out. For the soundtrack at the funeral, I propose
La mamma morta
sung by Maria Callas, followed by
Love Me Tender
by Elvis. Anything but Félix Leclerc or Jacques Brel. If anyone dares to play
Le tour de l'île
or
Le moribond
at my funeral, I'll leap out of my coffin screaming. That would make everyone sad, and I'd rather everyone sang and was happy when they drop me in the hole. That's what the chuckle is all about, but I should really stop telling you all this. For a start, I've violated Edict 101, and there are bound to be consequences.

S
uch was life
in the court of King Henry VIII. While the queen and king dreamed of the southern seas, I found refuge in books. Atlases were among my favourites, and to my eyes, their multicoloured maps were works of art. Then came books on popular science and animal biology. Their illustrations were a way for me to escape, if only for an instant, our depressing kingdom of the north.

Of all the animal species, those that made long annual migrations piqued my interest most. The library at the elementary school in Matane was home to quite an interesting collection on the animals of Canada. Each illustrated book focused on a particular Canadian animal, which made a change from all the books that spoke of French animals we were unlikely to ever encounter in our part of the world. What good did it do me knowing all about the reproductive habits of the hedgehog if I was condemned to live on the Gaspé Peninsula? I pounced on the “Caribou,” “Moose,” and “Salmon” books and devoured them with the enthusiasm others reserve for crime thrillers. Our teacher, Madame Levasseur, had noticed the quasi-religious state of ecstasy these descriptions of animal migrations plunged me into. By the spring of 1979, I had read all the books in the collection many times over. Madame Levasseur watched me comb the library shelves, desperate for anything on Canadian wildlife. Taking pity on me, she took a large book on the animals of eastern Canada out of the part of the library reserved for the older children. “You can read it over Easter break.” The next day, I had already read a third of the book, which I kept beneath my pillow.

I think I secretly envied how the Canada goose and caribou could relocate twice a year with disarming ease, while I was condemned to stay behind in the court. These animal books revealed sometimes troubling behaviour from certain species of bird, including the brown-headed cowbird (
Molothrus ater
), a common enough bird in the Quebec countryside that's often mistaken for a small crow. It's not its plumage that attracts attention, but rather its reproductive behaviour. That spring, I discovered the link that bound me to this particular species. And so Madame Levasseur's book followed me everywhere I went over Easter break.

Easter will always be my favourite public holiday. I come from the north, remember. When the first Sunday following the full moon after the spring equinox rolled around, we knew the worst of winter was behind us. The ice was beginning to free the St. Lawrence—beyond which we could barely distinguish the other shore—from its annual enslavement, revealing a dazzling shade of metallic blue. And when Jesus decided to come back to life later than usual, around mid-April, the plain of frozen azure tore at the retinas of wintering residents. The deathly silence of the Gaspé countryside was shattered by the song of birds we thought we would never see again, now proclaiming their melodious return to these lands of snow. Christmas is nice: no school for two weeks. Thanksgiving isn't bad, though a little chilly. But Easter holds the promise of finding the gloves we misplaced in the January snow.

In our lost and frozen north, only the snowy owl (
Nyctea scandiaca
) interpreted the tepid western wind as a threat to its immaculate plumage and used the diversion created by the arrival of spring to take flight to the dazzling beauty of the north. This noble bird of prey, a larger cousin of the owl, captured the attention of Quebec's National Assembly in 1987 when it was made the official bird of La Belle Province. That's how things work in North America. Each tribe choses its own totems. New Jersey opted for the American goldfinch, Louisiana for the brown pelican. Recently Quebec even chose an official insect, which to everyone's surprise wasn't the mosquito. Instead, a democratic vote crowned the white admiral butterfly, which might not be very well known or particularly common, but does have pretty colours. It was a tight race against the common eastern bumblebee.

As for the snowy owl, you have to admit that the animal is a powerful symbol, a reminder not only of the splendours of winter, but also of the importance of environmental conservation. A daytime hunter, it feeds on small rodents and is particularly fond of lemmings. The snowy owl builds its nest right on the ground, an act of negligence you can't hold against it, since it reproduces at a latitude where even the hardiest spruce tree would throw in the towel. Some snowy owl couples are known to be monogamous and, year after year, they nest in the same spot and feed their young with the same affection, offering their fledglings a stable, diligent, and faithful couple for parents. You'll understand that the choice of this particular bird as the official bird of my province left me perplexed. A bird that, on clear February days, would often look down on me with a knowing air from the top of a fencepost in the fields of the Gaspé countryside, one that inspires nothing but the dignity of parental duty. What might I be implying, you ask?

It's not the first time that Quebec has been wide of the mark.

It was over Easter break that nature and propriety forced the royal court to undertake a migration of its own. Tradition had it that we would lay down our arms to speed west on the still dangerously icy roads of the Gaspé Peninsula to visit my father's parents, who lived in Saint-Antonin, a sleepy little village running along the plateau behind the town of Rivière-du-Loup. A three-hour drive along a carpet of snow. We usually set off on Good Friday morning for a three-day visit to these people of an altogether different age. Leaving Matane behind was no hardship. We were simply serving our sentence there and half my captivity was given over to planning my escape, in any case. And so I sat in the back seat of our American car, rattling off the names of the hamlets standing between us and our goal. Saint-Ulric, Baie-des-Sables, Les Boules, Grand-Métis, Sainte-Flavie, Rimouski, Trois-Pistoles, L'Isle-Verte, Cacouna, and, like one last prayer before reaching salvation, Rivière-du-Loup appeared to me like Manhattan must have appeared to the
Titanic
survivors. Some will wonder how a mere three hundred kilometres could have seemed like a return to Ithaca. Because family visits, as long as they led to Anne Boleyn's family, were so frequent they were not even announced twenty-four hours in advance. When the time came to hop aboard for these destinations, no questions were asked. My sister and I followed because that's what children do: they follow. Visits to my grandparents on our father's side, on the other hand, were limited to New Year's and Easter.

For a long time, I would sleep on car journeys. But after the Great Upheaval I tried to keep my eyes open because it turns out you can never really know where they might be taking you. Sometimes you have only to close your eyes for an hour and you can end up far from home, in distant lands not of your choosing. There was no way I was going to let that happen again. The king and queen would take me wherever they pleased, but I was at least going to know what was happening this time. It was also following the Great Upheaval that car journeys began to make me feel incredibly sick. No one has ever been able to get to the bottom of those violent, messy bouts of travel sickness. Just leaving on a trip with the king and queen was enough to turn me green. And in fact I never felt ill when I travelled with other people. The car would gather speed, the king and queen would light a cigarette at the same time, and less than ten minutes later I would already be green in the back seat, much to the displeasure of the queen, whose tone would become reproachful. Sometimes they would have to stop the car and let me vomit at the side of the road while the queen cursed, “Are you done? What's taking you so long?” My sister was less given to these moments of weakness than I. Burying my nose in a book would help me delay the inevitable by a minute or two, which meant that I would be sick after Rimouski and not before. I would bury my nose in my book again to forget my vomiting spell.

According to that same book, the brown-headed cowbird owes its name to its habit of following herds of cows across the farms of North America. Before it followed cows, the cowbird would follow buffalo across the plains, back when it was still called a buffalo bird. Which means that it has never had a name of its own; it's always been named after the animal it follows. The book also explained that the bird doesn't build a nest. Just like the cuckoo, it squats in the nests of other birds to lay its eggs.

My reading was often interrupted by the king pointing out something by the side of the road. Near Rimouski there was, for instance, a big sign for “Monkey Heaven” a few kilometres to the south. The image of monkeys fresh out of the equatorial forest had the power to surprise on these boundless snow-covered stretches of highway. The place was a little like a zoo, but with only monkeys. They lived behind big windows, locked up year round in narrow wooden cages. Visitors would file past the filthy vivariums, home to a handful of sad and panic-stricken baboons looking around for their native Africa. The king explained that the place had been shut down after the authorities received a number of complaints about mistreated monkeys. They were underfed, they got sick, and they were left to die in their grimy cages. The crime appalled me. But I went on with my reading to keep my travel sickness at bay. The book went into great detail on the bird's parasitic reproductive behaviour. In the spring, the female cowbird lays an egg in another species' nest. The other mother often doesn't suspect a thing and sits on the intruder's egg along with her own. I was beginning to nod off in the back seat. Sleep slowly got the better of me, triggering terrible nightmares populated by starving monkeys and parasitic cowbirds. Books and reality intertwined, and I dreamed I was flying, beating my wings high above Virginia and Massachusetts, heading for Canada. The king woke me up when we arrived at my grandparents' village.

Saint-Antonin looks like any one of the hundreds of church-spired villages scattered across Quebec. The difference being that the municipality of Saint-Antonin (the village
and
parish) had a strange bylaw: bores were not tolerated. At the entrance to the village, a kindly guard leaned his head into each car to be sure it didn't contain anyone on his list. It was like a scene out of the Soviet Union. The guards had an almost infallible technique for sniffing out stuffed shirts. As the car slowly pulled up to the sentry box, one of the guards would follow the other's every movement, like the mime artists who practice their art in shopping malls. When the first guard realized what he was up to, he would turn and slap him hard across the face. A ferocious battle royal ensued.

If the people inside the car began to laugh, the barrier was raised immediately to let them through. If they remained impassive in the face of such antics, their identity was checked. Such searches had been known to take hours. If, by some misfortune, they took it into their heads to step out of the car to explain to the second guard that it wasn't right to make fun of others, and to the first that it was bad manners to slap his colleagues, their vehicle was refused passage on the spot. The license plate number was recorded in a surprisingly thick register and the information sent to the other villages around the world with similar legislation. An updated list of bores went out each year. Individuals named on it either had to refrain from visiting Saint-Antonin or do so incognito, keeping a low profile all the while. Whenever the border guards caught an intruder in the hamlet, they marched him or her to the village limits, explaining politely but firmly the reason for their expulsion. In Saint-Antonin's defence, the whole atmosphere in the village was at stake. We had uncles and aunts who had to be protected from pain-in-the-neck visitors. Not that they weren't able to protect themselves, but keeping outsiders at bay is tiresome and there is an infinite number of them. Some might cry xenophobia or intolerance. But to me it's just basic common sense. If you're a bore, you have a choice: shut up or stay home.

Entering my grandparents' house was like an Acadian homecoming, with shouts of joy, tearful hugging and kissing, and sparkling eyes. My grandmother, a woman who could make up for all of human iniquity with a single smile, the woman I would point to without the slightest hesitation if ever aliens kidnapped me and asked which human being should come with me to the planet Serenity, the woman who for years covered my fingers with wool during our harsh winters, would be waiting for us in a home so tidy it was the envy of Anne Boleyn. If it's true that cleanliness is next to godliness, my grandmother's house must have been the Vatican's anteroom. Once she stopped bustling about long enough to finally sit down in her rocking chair, we could see, if we squinted hard, particles of kindness dancing around her head. One day, the spiral of existence will cause these elementary particles of kindness to leave their orbit for a headlong dash into the void. That day, with a little luck, one of them will hit me square in the chest and transform me into an acceptable human being.

Before getting out of the car, the king and queen quickly took off their crowns and hid them in the trunk. All royal privileges were lost at my grandparents' house. Another reason to enjoy these visits to Saint-Antonin was that I no longer felt the little earthquakes there. It was quite amusing really. Henry VIII spoke to his father and mother as though they were gods. We found it hilarious. My grandmother, the happy woman that she was, was in raptures from the moment we arrived. She welcomed with open arms her two little soldiers on leave, her grown-up Henry VIII and his companion (whom she defused with a single glance), and my half-brother, still too much of a half to gauge the depths of the well of happiness we had just fallen into. We had been reduced to refugees, fleeing some country or other of misfortune and raised voices. The transformation was complete. We became planets orbiting around my grandmother. No Château Rancour flowed in her home. “How are the roads? Do you have much snow over your way? How big you all are! How good-looking, too! I'm so happy to see you!” She spoke an Esperanto understood by all, a language that used prosaic questions to give each of us back our value as human beings. There were no edicts in this house. The sabres returned to their sheaths, the cannons fell silent, the mines were deactivated. The series of offerings could begin.