The Islands of Dr. Thomas (13 page)

“Along with all the rest, he had a doctorate in science! He must have loved studying!”

The little bits and pieces of Doctor Thomas' biography always arrived with a note or a little anecdote from François. He had not been back to Saint-Pierre since the exhibition, but he was very present in her life. He phoned to tell her how his clients had reacted in such or such a way to the photos that filled his office.

“Saint-Pierre et Miquelon? I thought it was warm there. It's in the French Antilles, isn't it?”

Or else: “What are they doing, those people on the frozen pond?”

“They're sawing the ice, Madam.”

Émilie laughed, amused by the fact that the photos were doing their job and happy to be taking part, through Doctor Thomas' photographs, in his everyday life. And every time, he asked what she was planning to do in the fall.

“I'm not sure,” she replied, disappointed that she could not even confide in him, the one person to whom she thought she could tell everything.

“...Not sure, that's a bit vague.”

She wished she could toss out as a matter-of-fact, “Writer. I've decided to be a writer.” How would he respond to that? She had no idea. Despite everything that connected them, she was afraid. Not so much of his reaction, as what it would mean to state out loud the enormity of her ambition.

One Saturday morning François called her, very excited. At first she thought he must be calling because he had uncovered the thirty final years of Doctor Thomas' life. This was the period that was shrouded in mystery. In the 1950s, when he was in his sixties, he had slowed down his medical practice. Perhaps he had retired. But what did he do? Where did he go?

But that was not it. His enthusiasm hinged on something else. After months of negotiations, which he had not mentioned to her because he was afraid she would be disappointed if it had not worked out, the Marine museum and the Department of Overseas Territories had agreed to co-host an exhibition entitled
Louis Thomas, an Exceptional Doctor
.

“It is a bit like a sequel to our exhibition in Saint-Pierre. I was waiting to be sure it would happen to talk to you about it, but I've been working on it for a while now.”

She was speechless.

“I'll let you guess how much energy I've put into this, and how many contacts I've used to convince everybody. I had to stroke them a bit,” he admitted, laughing. He had mentioned that Doctor Thomas had been an honour to France in the colonies, and they could verify that in their archives. The curator of the museum could not get over it.

“He was a student of the famous Professor Calmette, he led a mission to the Grand Banks, and he published an exhaustive study of the dory, just to mention a few things! And nobody knows about him!”

The two departments were also on Doctor Thomas' trail. But they needed the glass plates, which were essential for the production of the exhibition.

“Émilie, we're putting you in charge of bringing them to France. The museum will pay your fare. Jacques agreed to let us have them, but it is out of the question for us to send them in the mail.”

“Why me?”

“Jacques can't close the studio so close to Easter. But he will come over for the opening. The museum will also pay for his trip.”

So it was as simple as that.
When you've built houses all over the world, your perspective isn't the same
, she thought affectionately. Even in her wildest dreams, she would not have been able to imagine such an adventure.

A few weeks later, during the Easter holidays, she left for Paris for the first time in her life. Her mission was to escort Doctor Thomas' photographs back to his homeland.

François had won. Dismissing all of the objections, finding solutions to every problem, he had looked after everything: airline tickets, lodging—the museum was paying for everything. After just a few phone calls, everything was in place. He talked to her parents several times to reassure them. They told him about their own concerns.

“Maybe you can convince her to study in France. She hasn't made a decision yet. It's as though she doesn't want to do anything. And she never talks to us about it.”

He promised to take her on a tour of Paris, to visit the Sorbonne, to show her all the incredible charms of the capital. He could already picture her in Saint- Germain-des-Prés, imagine her marvelling over all the little bookshops—she was always looking for something to read—her reverence as she visited the tombs of Voltaire and Rousseau in the Pantheon. He even planned to take her to the cemetery in Montparnasse, where she could kneel down in front of Baudelaire's tombstone, her favourite poet, as she had confided to him one evening when she opened her schoolbag and he found a worn-out copy of
Fleurs du mal
.

It was not the first time someone from Saint-Pierre et Miquelon came to visit him. François often received guests from the islands in Paris: his brothers, or simple acquaintances who came to see the country or, more often, for medical care. François always knew whose door to knock on, how to get an appointment with a famous specialist who was too busy to bother with everyday mortals. He knew all the right places to go and did not hesitate to use his connections. He was a “doer of favours,” as his compatriots called him. They appreciated this quality all the more because they knew how well-known he was and how busy. These sporadic visits distracted him for a little while, until some innocent comment from his visitor suggested that they took him for someone else, or they believed him to be deliriously happy when he was not really. Then a “wall” would fall between them, the way the Planck wall is thought by scientists to be the point at which scientific knowledge ends. Nothing that occurs beyond this point makes any sense.

There was no question about it...he was waiting for Émilie with great impatience. She would not be intimidated by the people around him, by this absurd status he had been given. He had learned to adjust to it and did not mind using it to help other people out, especially people visiting him from the islands. On the other hand, he did not take his Parisian life too seriously. Émilie would not either, he was sure of it. Paris would impress her in other ways though. He was already delighted at the thought of what he was going to show her.

When the plane took off from Saint-Pierre, Émilie felt the relief everyone from the islands feels when they manage to get away, which is quite a feat given the weather or the possible mechanical problems. Leaving meant conquering an isolation that people pretended to appreciate (“Here, at least, we don't have to worry about being attacked or assaulted”) but which occasionally became stifling.

Being so far off the ground gave her a rare moment of pure meditation. Alone, suspended in the heavens, with nothing to tie her to her familiar world, with no one to make conversation with, she could not escape a moment of self-evaluation.

This trip, which had not even been planned two weeks earlier, would give her a preview of her future, to see “if France and the university there could possibly suit me.” She did not have any great illusions about it; since she loved wide-open spaces, the ocean, and the barrens, she could not really picture herself in a big city. She had never been to France, but she had visited Montreal and Toronto and did not have very good memories of them.

What had bothered her about urban life was not so much the noise, the pollution, the crowds, or a certain fear of being attacked, robbed, or constantly jostled in the streets; it was the misery that affected her the most. In Montreal, for example, the drunken man she saw on the street corner (“
robineux
” as they are called), the young people her age with a dazed look who were pan-handling at the entrance of the metro station, the people living in the dingy streets sharply contrasted with the opulent hotels like the Queen Elizabeth or the Ritz-Carlton or the fancy stores like Holt Renfrew, where her grandmother bought a beautiful fur coat every ten years. All this ugliness, this poverty, barely hidden at the core of all that wealth and glitter. It was painful to see. The city was, in her eyes, the very expression of human distress, a witness to the collective madness of the human race and its frenetic course towards nothingness.

Was it better to confront the misery—to smile at the beggar and give him a dollar—or pretend not to notice and take advantage of the pleasures of the city, its department stores and fine restaurants that were so sorely lacking on the islands? By putting her face-to-face with her urge to buy pretty things and enjoy their distractions, big cities made Émilie uncomfortable. She never quite knew what to do, and felt confused and ashamed of herself. If Montreal and Toronto had this effect on her, she could only imagine that it would be worse in Paris.

France would not suit her, she told herself. François could call her “my little European” all he wanted, and boast of the advantages of Paris, but nevertheless she felt North American, more attracted by wide-open spaces than by a Europe whose population statistics alone made her dizzy. She also suspected that François was not telling her the whole truth. She knew that his success in the country of their Breton, Norman, and Basque ancestors (as they said) had not been enough to make him happy. If he really felt fulfilled, would he come home to the islands so often? Would he not already be married, have a family, be “settled,” as they said in Saint-Pierre et Miquelon? She had gathered that he was eager for her to move to Paris in order to fill an important void in his life. And, even though she loved him, she had decided not to do anything that would get in the way of her own quest for happiness.

Accustomed to the serenity of open spaces, the sea, and the distant coasts that one could see in the distance without feeling a need to visit, it was difficult to imagine herself living in Paris. However, that was where her studies would take her, to the Sorbonne, no doubt. But what would she study? Literature? She felt that such legendary institutions would be elitist and conflict with her personality. Competitive exams and friends in the right places, that turned her stomach. She did not want her studies to become a mental military service that made her think only of achievement and success, even at the expense of other students. What was wrong with studying for the pleasure of learning and finding her own way gradually? Were there programs that did not lead directly into specific careers? Why could she not simply study in order to enrich her knowledge, or develop as a person? What could she do while waiting to fulfill her dream of being a writer?

She envied people who had always known what they wanted to do: François, who had always wanted to be an architect, had designed houses when he was fifteen; the orthopedic surgeon who marvelled at the thought that he had never had to think about what he wanted to do, and had pretended to operate on his brother's leg on the kitchen table when he was ten years old. People who decided not to go to university fascinated her just as much: the big bruisers who explained shyly that they had always wanted to live by the ocean, the carpenters who were also shipbuilders, the captains on ocean-going ships or those who owned their own small boats, masters of onshore boats or fishers...all these people who never wondered what they would do with their lives. They had always known. She would have given a great deal to be like them.

However, she did not want a career anyway. The idea of training for a trade or a job and to spend her whole life doing it seemed like a jail sentence. What happened if, ten years later, she got tired of it? For her, it was impossible to envisage a life without change, repeating the same gestures, the same actions. Was it even possible to hope for something more?

“I could stay in Saint-Pierre.”

“No!” exclaimed everyone in her family.

The daughter and granddaughter of schoolteachers, she was expected to do more than work as a clerk or a saleslady. Sometimes she would rebel and declare: “It's nothing to be ashamed of!”

“Of course not,” her mother replied, “but you have so many options!”

Her family wanted her to “go away to university” because she had the opportunity to do it. Her intellectual abilities had opened up the door and the State now gave young people the means to afford it. Émilie would no doubt get scholarships, and her parents were sufficiently comfortable to be able to pay for however long she wanted to study. Choosing to stay here and get a job right away was a way of ignoring all the sacrifices made by generations who had worked hard and saved in order to make sure their children would have an easier life. She would be an ungrateful heir to those who had studied for years without any help.

“François received a state scholarship,” her mother explained. “Ask him to tell you about it. It had a fancy title, but that was about it. They paid a return trip for him every two years and gave him barely enough to live on while he was studying in Europe. Sometimes, he told us, all he had to eat for two or three days was a baguette and a piece of cheese. You'll have enough to live comfortably and come home every year. If you add in whatever we'll give you, you'll be fine.”

Émilie had to admit that the idea of staying in Saint-Pierre et Miquelon was as unpleasant as the thought of going away. Her studies had given her a view of the world and developed in her an intellectual curiosity that the islands could no longer satisfy. The books she read had made her an explorer, and her youth gave her a taste for adventure. She wanted to see other things, experience life differently...
But I don't really want to leave, either!
she thought. Her ambivalence was only getting deeper.