Laverdure the parrot says: “Chatter, chatter, it’s a problem.”
Laverdure the parrot says: “Chatter, chatter, you’re always the problem, chatter, that’s all.”
So I will be the problem and that will be all.
* * *
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Ghighi!
You’re still depressed!
You wander! You see ghosts!
My colleagues told me that you were pacing up and down the second floor of the G.B. Were you looking for me? Let’s see a movie or grab a meal soon… whenever you like… Pick up the phone!
Later!
Courrège
xx
* * *
* Vacher’s Une petite fin du monde: Carnet devant la mort [A Small End of the World: Notebook Before Death] was published by Éditions Liber in 2005. (Trans.)
5.
C Like Cinema
maldonne was milking him. siphoning him, sucking him off, getting her fill.
A persistent and experienced farmer, she nodded in agreement, barely swayed through salivary noises, plunged back into apnea, her glottis getting hammered.
Sex overflowed at Pascal’s place. Maldonne flailed in his bed, writhed like a Desdemona, swallowed with tenderness. Over 300 million unborn North Americans downloaded into the moist environment and swam. Pascal stopped puffing and panting; he’d shot his load.
Then, hands. One pair of hands, another pair of hands. Twisting and kneading, Pascal confirmed the presence of Maldonne’s breasts. An anatomy lesson on a nighttime divan, “yes” repeated faster and faster until the final YES.
Well, not exactly a nighttime divan, but a Louis IV sofa.
Fucking is a less conventional art than farting, but as reassuring as walking.
We had to come together, before the pre-Viagra panic and andropause, on the field of unmade beds and pornographic citations.
Groan, and you frown; spit out, and geese come out; do the nasty, your hair gets messy; lash out, and they put out.
* * *
I open the door and say “hello.”
I’m getting manuscripts. It’s nice outside. A sunny, blue sky. I walk to the back of the office, pull on the handle of the metal cabinet.
In the shadows, there are packs of paper, boxes of paperclips, manila envelopes, rolls of fax paper, jars of rubber bands, scissors, piles of bubble envelopes, binder clips of different sizes heaped on a tray.
I rummage and poke around, for the sole pleasure of rummaging and poking around. It passes the time. Then I make a deft turn on my left foot. I become a reader that notes and compiles once more.
Bergamote hands me the bag of four manuscripts. Four more sanitary tasks, four more verdicts to decide.
Bergamote skims the reader reports I’ve brought her. The papers rustle in her hands, her decision is made before she’s reached the bottom of the page.
While she’s busy examining my reading notes, I scan the titles of the new manuscripts she’s given me: Melancholic Passion by Jean-Michel Arvasti (no doubt a heavy-handed political thriller); The Shack That Struck by Ginette Falardeau (a memoir or a fantasy crime novel with a rural tang of the mall art gallery variety, although the title is not uninteresting, vaguely intriguing, already a good point); Censorship in Marieville by Sébastien Ducharme (a moral-political rant with severe acne, or an amateur whodunit with asinine moralizing, the title doesn’t bode well); The Golgotha of Tears by Fabrice LeBreton (ugh! an edifying Melgibsonian work or a maudlin pensum, written with excessive compassion, it’s hard to expect anything other than a literary disaster: title in bad taste, metaphorical immoderation, inane imagination—I already have my reasons for rejecting it, now I just have to confirm my disgust…).
Bergamote has finished reading. She raises her head. A few minutes have passed. She tells me: “So nothing good, in the end.”
I tell her: “A bad batch.”
Easygoing about the routine, Bergamote deposits the now officially rejected manuscripts on a pile under her desk. She unsticks the “rejected” Post-it note from the previous top manuscript in the pile and sticks it on the new manuscript that has just joined its lost companions.
The cycle continues.
My mission: show no mercy.
My life is a bad novel I had the decency not to write. My distribution neurosis compensates for all the asceticism.
* * *
Maldonne is nibbling on some buttered toast. Pascal serves her coffee. A moment of respite.
maldonne: Delicious.
pascal: More butter?
maldonne: No, I’m fine.
pascal: How do you take your coffee?
maldonne: Black.
pascal: Want a biscotti?
maldonne: No, thanks.
Some time passes.
pascal: I haven’t heard any news about the parrot. I imagine its owner picked it up.
maldonne: Or some enthusiast bought it…
pascal: Perhaps it’s already roasted…
maldonne: A chicken deluxe!
pascal: A dinner with feathers!
maldonne: “Boo!... Boo!...” It’s Laverdure the parrot! (Stereotypical ghostly movements, mouth like a hen’s arse.)
pascal: Booooo!... Litterrrratuuuuuurre pays us a visit… Fiction suddenly looms up in reality… (Exaggerated pronunciation, Yves P. Pelletier comic effect.)
maldonne (chuckling): Poor Ghislain.
pascal: Poor asshole, yes. He needs to get a real job.
maldonne: He’s not an asshole, just a bit nutso, depressed.
pascal: Okay, you have fifteen seconds to think of as many depressives as you can among our common friends… Go!
Fifteen seconds pass.
maldonne: Shit, I thought of ten!
pascal: Go ahead, name them!
maldonne: Ghislain (goes without saying), Marco Bédard, Isabelle Lavigne, Jean-François Beauregard, Émile-Sacha Dovari, Chantal Gariépy, Manolo Carrière, Stéphane Sicotte, Viviane Norah, Emmanuel Landry. It’s ridiculous.
pascal: If everyone’s sick, then it’s no longer a sickness.
maldonne: So what is it?
pascal: A new human state. A stronger form of melancholy. In the past, drinking used to be enough.
maldonne: It’s sad, all this. Poor Ghislain.
pascal: He’ll come back from his parrot. Naïveté is not incurable, you know.
maldonne: It’s him I’m worried about, not his parrot.
Pascal awkwardly makes himself a cappuccino.
maldonne: He needs a girlfriend. Or someone to persuade.
pascal: Ghislain’s definitely heavy-handed. The problem is that he imposes his anxieties on us, as if we needed them. The other night, I felt like I was talking to a depressed politician who’d lost his grip.
maldonne: What’s he done to you that you’re bitching about him like this? He just needs some help, like everyone else.
pascal: He needs a shrink.
maldonne: It’s not as bad as that. He just needs a nice girl. He’s like a baby. You need to give him lots of attention, coddle him a bit, listen to him. I like reading too, but I’m not caught up in his religion… When it comes down to it, Ghislain is a sectarian, a Jehovah’s Witness of the Quebecois book.
pascal: I can just see him with a suitcase full of books, going door to door, summarizing the plots, offering…
maldonne: He wouldn’t sink as much into his neurosis if a chick pulled him out of the hole when needed.
pascal: Listen, I like Ghislain just fine, but in my opinion, he needs a decent salary, good entertainment, travel. And a clear diagnosis to know what pills to take.
maldonne: No, I’m telling you, he just needs a chick…
pascal: Forg
et it. A chick with that much patience doesn’t come with the “Books” supplement in the Devoir…
maldonne: It’s possible.
pascal: Everything is possible. Even Laverdure the parrot! In a fantasy world, guys like Ghislain are married to beautiful princesses and busy with their court of elfish minions carrying chestnut-stuffed pheasants on silver trays, and drinking “heady” wines in crystal goblets (trying to look like a dimwit).
* * *
How will I be remembered? How will people remember me?
10:57 p.m.
There’s a lineup at the cash. Always the same lineup before 11 p.m. I’m working alone in this fucking dep, and everyone comes to buy what everyone comes to buy a few minutes before 11 p.m. Tastes are varied, the choice is varied. A twelve-pack of Budweiser, one Fin du monde, a vodka cooler, two brown Boréale, a six-pack of Heineken in cans, a large bottle of Black Label, a large bottle of Red Bull, a twelve-pack of Wildcat. Eight people in line and more coming through the door, already beating a path to the fridges. I hurry. Take out my key. Enforce the law. I have eight doors to lock, eight beer caves to seal off. Behind the counter earlier, I managed to roll down the screen over the wine section. Not very popular. I get it. Beer is the quality alcohol in deps. As quickly as possible, before the impatient rabble gets a chance to lose their cool, I turn the small key to the right in all the locks of the alcohol fridges. I’ve become an expert. Complete the procedure in under thirty seconds. Then quickly get back behind the till. It’s a mess. There are some administrative tasks to finish, paperwork to fill out. It’s all piled up on my Loto-Québec counter-top display. I hide all of the varieties of scratch & win cards and lotto tickets. Avoid thinking about two or three customers. Two or three customers that I often see a few minutes before 11 p.m. and around noon, when I work days.
The 11 p.m. rush is over.
That’s it. By the end of the night, I will have to refuse to sell beer to at least three people. At least one drunk per week always comes to the counter to drool for beer. Even if they are ready to pay me, I have to enforce the law, and I enforce it. Between 11 p.m. and the early morning hours, there’s no longer a means of escaping reality through alcohol. You must be stocked up in advance or resort to other substances.
How will I be remembered?
A young woman, no more than twenty-five, comes in to fuel up on slush. She fills a medium-sized cup (way too enormous for my stomach) with slush the colour of fresh blood. A fluorescent crimson mixture, cherry flavoured.
The same stupid question seems rooted to the spot, on the other side of the counter, like the nighttime customers, the thirsty zombies of modern times.
I don’t blame them, I don’t judge them. I don’t care. I enforce the law, squeezed into my uniform that comes down to a blue shirt. If I had a gun, I would be a soldier or a policeman; if I wore white, I would be an administrator, doctor or nurse, a cook or a barber; if I wore an orange jumpsuit, I would be a prisoner. The uniform reassures people. It reinforces prejudices and helps people avoid total confusion. It’s a con job and an identity barrier all at once. Even though the uniform has much less prestige today than it once did, it remains a convenient bastion against the onslaught of madness.
How will my time on earth be remembered?
A pack of Belvedere Extra Mild and a pack of Excel Extreme Shock gum. A clean, bearded man in a trendy windbreaker.
How will I be remembered?
As part of the silent majority, a shadow: Je suis une ombre.
Two jittery youths come in. I watch them but don’t really give a damn, either. They return with a bag of black pepper and jack cheese Doritos and two litres of Coke Zero. The more nervous of the two also buys a Mr. Big and a pack of Craven “A” cigarettes. He looks to be about eighteen—no zeal tonight. They pay and leave.
How will we be remembered?
I recall reading an article on this topic by Stanley Péan in an issue of Alibis (a clone of American crime magazines, same format, same layout, same questionable graphic design).
Péan had written something along the lines of—I’m quoting from memory: “In the future, people will say about the people of our era: they read newspapers and watched TV.”
So, for some future historians, we would become newspaper readers and couch potatoes.
Would I not then be a typical, authentic product, a characteristic human of my era? Me, Ghislain the reader.
A bag of ketchup-flavoured Lay’s, a carton of Québon chocolate milk. The young woman pays without even looking at me. She’s preoccupied with something else.
Will people remember that those like me helped shape our era?
Not necessarily. Those who write will end up in archives and on library shelves, gaining stature day by day.
That said, more adventurous researchers will perhaps unearth piles of reading reports left behind by the readers of publishing houses, if those houses give their archives to the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec or Library and Archives Canada. A few years ago, the reading reports of Georges Perros, a reader for La Nouvelle Revue Française and the Théâtre National de Paris, were published.
A large bar of Poulain chocolate. The customer, with a melancholic air, stares wearily at my hands with increasing effort—he definitely needs his sugar fix.
What will people remember about me?
Nothing, no doubt. And I don’t even care that much, in fact. Perros, in any case, doesn’t count. He was first and foremost a poet, a writer. Someone more generous than me, who had the clarity to title one of his books Une vie ordinaire.* Of all his work, this one is surely what will live on. The freshness of truth never gets old.
As for me, my friends will bury me, still believing the prejudices they already have against me, the envy and contempt they don’t dare articulate.
With respect to history with a capital H, we are all convenience store customers after eleven at night, stooping shadows, unable to reconsider our habits and take our normal, healthy human comfort into account. Silhouettes with no courage, no audacity, no constructive ambition. (Everywhere, narcissism and destruction reign supreme.)
I am a normal, healthy human being. I am Ghislain the reader. If I don’t write anything about the appearance of Laverdure the parrot, no one will know anything about it. Since I will not write anything about Laverdure the parrot, no one will hear anything about Ghislain the reader. I don’t give a damn.
In a way, I’m protecting myself from future disappointment.
Every normal individual over thirty has constructed their identity based on one or two well-kept secrets. The theory of My New Partner (a film by Claude Zidi that hasn’t aged well), that each one of us has something to feel guilty about, is not entirely true. It would have been more apt to say that each one of us either has something to feel guilty about or invents something to feel guilty about. A nuance, therefore. In both cases, there’s a secret. Everyone needs a secret. It’s the only way to make ourselves interesting to the majority. Our identity is based on a secret, or two or three at best. So when we meet perceptive people who see through us, we feel as though we’re standing naked before them, emptied of our content. And rarely is there much content. Depth is a mere three or four paragraphs behind a mysterious assertion, that’s all. The rest is marginalia. It gives work to so-called intellectuals. I am not an intellectual, I am a reader. It’s different. However, I must admit that everyone’s secrets give me work. No secrets means no manuscripts, no desire to disclose oneself, or to refuse to disclose oneself by beating about the bush for fifty attempts at a novel.
A jar of Cheez Whiz, a litre of 1% milk, a loaf of Weston whole wheat bread, and a copy of People. The man smiles at me. He’s sporting a black leather jacket, a nose ring, and a tattoo on his neck (“More Skull”), all consistent with the neighbourhood stereotype. The man chooses 1% milk. He is someone who reads, no doubt. He is also someone who plays with
his secret.
* * *
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Hey Caveboy!
Are we going to the movies?
I’m still going to be your friend, even if you don’t call me anymore.
I’ve been looking through the film listings in the papers… on Rotten Tomatoes and IMBD… I keep finding interesting things (that’s the theme: interesting things). You know, it’s like the Americans say: “...like a kid in a candy store.” Well, now I’m the one in front of all these movies that are making me drool.
Should we pick something at random? I’ll give you three choices: a film at random; a film playing at a specific time on a specific day; a flop.
Does that work for you? Tell me what you think…
Cut out the letters of the alphabet and put them in a small envelope! Then if you pick the letter Q, for example, I suggest The Queen by Stephen Frears (Dianesque times, Elizabeth II played by a flawless actress, a director at the peak of his career, fiction bordering on documentary with a particularly attentive art director…) If you pick the letter B, we’ll see Babel by Iñárritu, who directed Amores Perros and 21 Grams (a virtuosic interweaving of stories like his previous films, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in the main roles, story of language, nightmare of Babel, unbearable suspense and drama... have I piqued your interest?). For letter C, we have Congorama by our old favourite, Philippe Falardeau (did well at Cannes, features an emu (a kind of ostrich), Paul Ahmarani and Olivier Gourmet (awesome actor and a favourite of the Dardenne brothers), sociological look at regional Quebec with a plot twist, good reviews).
Shall I go on?
Two ore letters… If you feel like a flop, it’s easier, you don’t need any letters, just pick a genre… that will determine the type of flop: horror equals a bloody flop, a series of successful and unsuccessful special effects; adolescent comedy equals a good flop, if the amount of scatological, sexual, contemptuous, jackass, and sadistic jokes exceeds the amount of good feelings and moral twists; a war or sports movie equals an excellent flop, if the amount of courage and psychological and physical obstacles, as well as the rate of action scenes, scenes of slaughter or difficult surgeries (amputating, sewing up organs, sawing off parts of the skull) exceed the sentimental parts in which people socialize, touch each other, share their fears, and talk about their childhoods.
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