Readopolis

by Bertrand Laverdure

  As for me, her late arrival (in this case, to the screening of Lemming by Dominik Moll) added an additional annoyance: she would make me miss the beginning of the film. Fortunately, our friendship was protected by a few rules of goodwill, which we did not hesitate to use, such as the one stipulating that any lateness to a film or show authorized the person on time to depart from their function of the “waiter” and grab a seat in the theatre with no hard feelings.

  Given our situation as cultural workers with numerous deprivations, neither one of us had a cell phone. The tacit, amicable agreement, the patiently created precedent of our sensual friendship, provided for the resolution of these misdemeanours.

  But the damage was done.

  For some unknown, metaphysical reason, I found that our difficult yet sensual relationship deserved to be protected, manicured, waxed. I stubbornly continued to blow hot and cold, without ever disconnecting our relations from the central heating block. We regularly imposed mutual torture on one another, each taking turns under the covers, admitting our mistakes yet continually repeating them, like comic book characters. No doubt, we liked fooling around. I couldn’t grasp all the motives. One thing is certain: I thought of a sports analogy whenever those to whom I recounted our story inevitably asked the same questions. In my opinion, we were playing an interminable tennis match in which no winner ever seemed to emerge. A surrealist tennis match, reduced to a perpetual tie: advantage Ghislain, tie, advantage Maldonne, tie. Our mutual inability to know how to win a set transformed us into paradoxical adversaries. Who knew when the other would falter? we each wondered.

  * * *

  Ghislain is a loner. A hermit who is afraid of women. I don’t say this out of bravado, or to brag. I just know it.

  I had sex with him. No guy ever refuses the advances of a bold woman. That’s all. It’s enough! It’s not like I’m looking for some good cock or a teddy bear. I have needs and I express them.

  For me, Ghislain is a question mark on two feet.

  I haven’t become persona non grata because I missed our last movie date, have I?

  Am I too demanding or too naughty? Does he see me as a castrating bitch? Ugh, horrible, he sees me as a castrating bitch. I’ve given him castration anxiety. No! Me, a castrating bitch! I hope this isn’t how he sees me.

  And anyway, this film Lemming, with the small rodent caught in the S-bend of the kitchen sink, is totally anal, totally castrating (Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character, who suffers from a split personality and sleeps with her husband’s boss, but also everything else that happens in the film, is enveloped in dreams, nightmares, dual personalities). The film itself suffers from castration anxiety. It prevaricates while seeking the viewer’s orifice. Embarrassed with its hard-on, its semi-hard-on.

  Must I take off, isolate myself on the islands of Denmark, follow the characters’ journey in Aquin’s Hamlet’s Twin, suffer from all the existential angst and transform into an Ophelia of ice?

  Is it my turn to compose my own Antiphonary, my book of solemn, liturgical chants to better avoid good old psychoanalytical atheism?

  All this is disorienting.

  Why does this old knowledge bother me all of a sudden, why does it cast a spell on me? I’m getting off track. It’s coming back now. I was starting to get off track. I am getting off track. Okay! Okay, look, he’ll get his chance. I’ll give him a chance. It’s not possible. I know that things are reciprocal. It’s not as though I sensed his nervousness under the table or felt his knees shake as a symptom of his stupid fears.

  Being afraid of women is totally stupid. He’s not afraid. He’s not stupid. He just has some kind of mental block, some grief. That’s all.

  He is sullen, passive, pensive, but not stupid. Okay, then. I’ll be patient. It’ll be my turn. I made him angry. That’s for sure. Maybe he thinks I don’t respect him?

  I’ll wait for him to call me. I won’t play the penitent woman.

  But first, to not let things fester in misunderstanding and hang in the air, I need to set things straight.

  A ten-word email will do.

  * * *

  This morning, I woke up with Robert De Niro’s mindset in The Mission. I’m seeking one more reader.

  My fists are tense.

  I stiffen into a farmyard prophet, a rooster, having felt the ridiculousness of missionary zeal seize me. Anyone with a mission gets worked up, becomes awkward.

  Since I woke up, this project has seemed undeniably relevant. I needed a counterpart, a counterweight, a second side to my life as a prospector-reader condemned, for the most part, to read bad manuscripts. Acid/base, black/white, yin/yang, you name it; on the one hand, I would look for manuscripts, and on the other, I would try to recruit readers.

  * * *

  That was all. It was simple, almost trivial. I needed to recruit readers for the authors I had liked.

  We place too much emphasis on publication.

  But this is only the start of the problem. As soon as the book is put into circulation, the hunt for readers begins. The hunting expedition is expected to end only when every potential reader has been exposed, if only for a few hours, to the book in question. An impossible challenge, undoubtedly riddled with problems. The life of a book is determined by the number of people who spontaneously transform it into a relay race.

  Every book is conceived as a particular attractor, a unique character evolving on the heath of books. Labyrinthine, the world of books looks just like an underground city governed by writer-lords or book-lords, the newborns and translated immigrants enriching the social fabric, which is always in motion, never circumscribed.

  I realized I was a scout. I felt like an agitated squirrel.

  I could have asked Alberto Manguel to come to my rescue, could have summoned him to spread the good word about Quebecois books, about the richness of our French culture set in its beautiful American case. But this wasn’t his cup of tea. Literary decorum demanded readers first be offered the canon, the vulgate, the Deuteronomy. Three or four authors, never more, form the base of a national literature. This great triumvirate or quatriumvirate usually represents the amount of literary knowledge required to claim that we know the literature of a country, province, or region in the world.

  And even two suffice! Spain? Cervantes and García Lorca. The United States? Melville and Whitman.

  And yet it’s reductive to think we know Montreal after only seeing Old Montreal, the Olympic Stadium, and Sainte Catherine Street. What about Verdun? The Pointe-aux-Prairies Nature Park, Promenade Bellerive, Bois-d’Anjou, Parc île Haynes, or the beautiful shores of Senneville or Baie-d’Urfé? In this regard, knowing a city means continuing to traverse it, to walk it without blinders on and without prejudice, avoiding the media and tourist trenches.

  But I was talking about books.

  At best, I was going to unearth forgotten works, give them a second life; at worst, I was going to distribute works that have lost the right to survive in commercial bookstores.

  In principle, I would first need to convert someone who despised fiction: Pascal.

  * * *

  To: readmeagain@sympatico.ca

  From: earnestoearnesto@gmail.com

  Dear Ghighi,

  The show didn’t keep me in the end. I don’t care. I had fun. That’s the main thing.

  I read Alia by Mélikah Abdelmoumen last night. Pure guilty pleasure. Short, light-hearted novel with amusing literary love. Some novelists nowadays can be read quickly, like a good dose of sugar candy for the spirit. One of the literary characters, a film subtitler, totally delighted me. Imagine the witticism of such a character. I would’ve liked it even more if this novelist-neurotic character who was tormented by her parents suddenly lost her mind and got transformed into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Manguel’s A Reading Diary… you told me to read it you shrewd devil… you’re looking for mentors (The Adven
tures of Telemachus by Fénelon, a didactic treatise written in the guise of a novel, in which we discover the character of Mentor, the benevolent tutor whose name has come to mean “an experienced and trusted adviser or guide”). Do you remember when Manguel mentions that the I (our French je) stands between the H of Hyde and the J of Jekyll! An amusing semantic discovery, don’t you think? The I disguised between the H and J… I would add between the H of Hatred and the J of Jealousy. We could go on. I love word teasers…)

  Yes, this character should have invented subtitles, rewritten her own film. A novelist, it’s possible… anyway, yes… she could have ventured into the unknown and let her Sapphic imagination flow… Let’s say her feminine imagination first and secondly Greek and thirdly poetic and fourthly passionate about a sensuality that is perverse or pleasing, depending on the country where you use the word. Well, anyway, you’ll see…

  Why have I turned into a reviewer of Quebecois literature? Because you told me your secret. Well, actually, Pascal told me your secret. You want to become a proselytizer. You want to spread the good word of Quebecois literature… So I feel justified in giving you my reading observations. Pascal found your convictions pretty entertaining… You remind me of the president of UNEQ… always standing at attention, manly, sensitive, and with a hint of jazz-revolutionary desperation in the eyes, a man who draws his pen faster than his shadow moves, Stanley Péan is the Lucky Luke of book distribution in Quebec… But ever since that inscrutable François Avard proclaimed in ICI that Quebecois literature is dull and that the Devoir’s book section looked like The Catholic Register, we can understand why people like Péan are necessary. They reset the clock, build the clock, play clockmakers, and repair the clock… You know as well as I do that the clock of Quebecois literature looks more like Poe’s pendulum… made to torture all those who approach it with impunity… Sugar-coated torture, fidgeting on Radio-Canada… Basket of verse…

  Pascal finds you really funny… He told me that you recommended he read Le Grand Khan by Jean Basile… You, you little agitator, tried to tell him that the novel was in no way a history book about the emperor of the Mongols… Not historical at all, rather a slice of life of several characters, written in a flowing, telegraphic language, a page-turner with no bathroom breaks… Your effort delighted him so much that he’s given in.

  I’ll read it too and we’ll get together?

  Wasn’t Basile a Russian homosexual? And a former journalist for La Presse? Didn’t he die of AIDS?

  By the way, Pascal thought it would be a good idea to have a Grand Khan get-together at his place next Saturday. You’re not working at the Liposuction Slushie on Saturday, are you?! Saturday at Pascal’s, we’ll erect an altar to the literature from here, we’ll fashion our precious ones, Huysmans-style, we’ll build a dazzling turtle of a thousand sapphires whose remote-controlled mission will be to bite the legs of people who mope…

  Ciao!

  Courrège

  xx

  3.

  Laverdure the Parrot

  pascal’s small apartment.

  The calm clamour of the street.

  No troubles. No blockheads. Music: Chick Corea, “Steps – What Was” from Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, 1968, Blue Note.

  The door opens and closes three times. Maldonne looks at the fridge, patters around the kitchen, heads for the bathroom. First bar. Courrège, shy, in a freeze frame, hangs back near the entrance and the living room. Pascal, courteous, shows her his collection of Baroque CDs. A piano clangs and pounds in the background. Increasing speed. Suspended notes. Ghislain’s mind is spinning. He’s ready. Not sure for what. But he’s ready. The music moves his feet implicitly, secretly sneaks into his metacarpi.

  They launch into the slow chaos of get-togethers and conversations. They dive in. Confident. Pascal makes a witty remark. Courrège brightens up. The signal is given, the group forms. Maldonne returns to the living room. Ghislain doesn’t speak to her yet. They wait for words, they wait for topics, viewpoints, the upward curve of laughter and alcohol.

  Beer is secured from the fridge at a steady pace. Maldonne hurries to get it, uncomfortable. Offers one to Ghislain out of reflex. Ghislain grabs the bottle and turns his back on her. Thirty-year-old adolescents; it’s touching.

  They sketch out patterns, lose their discomfort in fits and starts, peripherally at first, then moving into the centre. The music gives an order to battle, suggests certain measures. They won’t go there yet. There’s a theme. It’s true. They have gathered for a reason. The torrent of tension gives way to an attempt at cohesion. It’s time. Ghislain pulls up a chair. Briefly tries to draw the others’ attention. In vain. Forward move. Courrège is listening. But she’s the only one. She reflects during a short drum solo. Pascal delivers replies, chooses an interlocutor; the conversation settles into good-natured sarcasm. They still don’t know much yet. They hesitate. Chick Corea releases tremulous sound waves, Felliniesque colours into the nest. Everyone is talking. To the walls. While laughing. Pascal speaks. He has the floor. He charms because he speaks his mind and targets his interlocutors. And sometimes he doesn’t speak his mind. He knows. He’s got it. He arouses relief, a laugh, ease. He knows. Controlling the humour of the situation, he’s not a materialist for nothing. Has all he needs to become a courtier. He knows it, has read Baldassare Castiglione.

  The pendulum swings, leaves the music behind. A wild note gives them hope of some kind of emulsion. They are deluding themselves, but they’re having fun. Ghislain crumbles. Keyed up. Courrège, who gets along equally well with Pascal and Ghislain, throws in a question that’s high up on the evening’s agenda. More beer, please. Skip the decorum. Pascal echoes the la, drums the beat with his fingers, mimics Corea with his voice. Everything winds around and remains for a moment under their feet, in their hands. Courrège shifts gears, drinks slowly, states the four steps of devotion: patience, grace, verbal ability, and adult candour. While sacred, hirsute vessels may reign on a distant dresser in Pascal’s bedroom, they’re not yet shaping the sorcery of the evening.

  courrège: This is a reading party...

  ghislain: Did everyone find the book?

  maldonne: No problem.

  pascal: Good old library and archives cataloguing.

  ghislain: No one bought it?

  maldonne: What for?

  ghislain: I’d rather buy books. I don’t like pecking about in library copies.

  courrège: What’s important is reading the thing, not owning it.

  ghislain: No, borrowing bothers me.

  pascal: Strange way of thinking.

  ghislain: I’m not a fetishist.

  maldonne: I think you are a bit. It’s important to see things as they are.

  ghislain: Things are fine as they are.

  pascal: Anyway, I read Le Grand Khan.

  maldonne: What did you think?

  pascal: Basile’s not a bad writer. I loved the portrait of Montreal in the ’60s, the old Kresge stores, Dorchester Street—his book is a user’s manual of walking. It’s also dense. He doesn’t want to give us time to breathe; he thrashes about like a demon in a web of cultural references. I liked it.

  ghislain: But it’s fiction. You just read some fiction and liked it?

  pascal: I’m not narrow-minded, Ghis. I read historical tomes and biographies, but that’s not why I refuse to see films by Todd Haynes, Emmanuel Mouret, or Paul Thomas Anderson. You literary people are funny. You live according to fixed principles. Fiction is organic, isn’t it? Just like life?

  ghislain: I thought you hated novels and poetry.

  pascal: Hold on, I didn’t say I read poetry. I don’t know anything about poetry. That’s a fact. But still, just because I don’t know anything about a genre doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it. It’s just a question of exposure.

  Courrège removes the Corea CD and looks through the stacked cases of copi
ed music, takes out John Zorn’s Protocols of Zion.

  Soon they’ll start playing variations of the current exchanges, but they know, everyone knows, that the parrot lies in wait. They hear a tapping on the window. The clang of a ring against a glass pane. Almost imperceptible. Zorn delivers his score of exercises in cinematographic style. Zorn in the apartment and a tapping on the window that no one hears.

  They rant and rave, then someone needs to go to the dep: they’re out of beer. Ghislain asks them which chips to get. Whatever, as long as they’re salty. The parrot is still tapping on the window. No one hears it. The conversation has gotten back on track; Basile’s book reaches out, opens eyes, brings up citations, begins to unite the mobile readers by subsuming them.

  Maldonne heads to the kitchen. Discrete, hand on the door handle. Then, when she opens the door, her eyes meet the parrot. She jumps.

  maldonne: Hey! Come see! What’s going on? There’s a parrot in the kitchen!

  ghislain: What!

  No one knows what to do: open the window; call the spca, the fire department, a taxi; take off running; or admit their fondness for bird hunting.

  pascal: Ghislain, go get my leather gloves from the hallway closet. The large, black leather gloves. We should at least try to bring it inside.

  maldonne: You’re sure it’s safe?

  courrège: Parrots have really sharp beaks!

  ghislain (returning with the gloves): What you’re doing is illegal… If an accident happened, how would you… It must be someone’s, there’s no parrot nest up on Mont Royal, it’s got to be someone’s… Maybe it has a ring around its claw. Is there a ring around its claw?

  pascal: No, there’s nothing that looks like a tag or a marker… Okay, protect your eyes! I’m opening the window!