by Abla Farhoud
Although her father had also abandoned her two brothers and her mother, she always took it as a personal affront to her. She would never forgive him for this unspeakable act, this indelible slap in the face. It brought to mind the idea of “outrage,” a term for gross indignity that she had come across in a French play by Racine.
For years, she lied to her friends and acquaintances. She would say, “My father is dead,” adding, in a simpering tone, “I am an orphan.” So as not to feel the sting of those words, she would put on a coy little face. She would never have admitted that her father had abandoned her. You might as well get out your violin, while you were at it, and start bawling, adding humiliation to the indignity. Even though her father phoned from time to time or sent postcards from Hungary, New Zealand or Indonesia, the damage was already done and for her he was dead.
To release the anger and alleviate the pain, which she never talked about, not to anyone, to get through it all, she began to drink. With time, this way of coping with her anger and drowning her sorrows became a way of life.
When she was drinking, everything was fine. Everything was nicer when she was drinking. As if by magic, she felt beautiful, she became more interesting and funny, and she wasn’t afraid of anything. Everything was all right, everything was there for a reason. Life, all of life, should have continued like that, pleasant and sweet, and nothing should ever have come to an end. She could finally breathe without any anxiety. She could be on the same wavelength as her friends, or her lover of the moment, and anyone else who had his eye on her. The world suddenly meant something. She was no longer alone.
She loved being drunk because it made her feel that anything was possible, that she was going to do big things in life and that she had been wrong to think that she was a nobody. She wasn’t a nobody. No, she was exceptional, as her dad had so often told her. He wasn’t around anymore, but it didn’t matter, she was old enough to live her life without him, without her grieving mother, without her two idiot brothers. The world was magnificent, as were all the people with whom she shared the art and science of drunkenness.
She became euphoric when she thought of the world and of herself in the world in this way. It had to keep on going, on and on. Her ecstasy would grow as the evening wore on. Wine, beer and shooters. Shooters, wine and beer. Keep this high afloat, dear God, make it last forever. She was someone who had never believed in anything, but now she began to believe in a God with a white beard, in Shiva with his many comforting arms, and in carnal, spiritual and universal Love.
Then, everything began to go downhill. She never saw it coming.
How was she going to stay the course, how was she going to keep from falling off a cliff? How, indeed? Shit, shit, shit. Fuck you all. In a twinkling, it was over and she was split in two. She knew she was going too far, and at the same time, she was drawn to this extreme, bottomless pit that she knew so well, where everything was possible, in a no-holds-barred, excessive, degenerate, self-destructive, I’m-not-worth-any-more-than-this
sense. Even though she would occasionally have a brief glimpse of what her life might be like if she “took charge of herself,” an expression often bandied about, which she hated more than anything. But she had already gone too far. It was irreparable, she was sliding deeper and deeper, sliding to the death she was so afraid of, and which she craved with all her heart. Through death, she would be able to relive her childhood, be reunited with her father and mother, and become small and beautiful and joyful again. To disappear for a time, at least for a while, to get washed, to clean up, to retrieve the laugh she had had as a child and to get her big, beautiful and dreamy eyes back again. To start over again, please, please, yes, to start over again, to pick life up where she had left off, before everything had happened and conspired to make her life such a disgrace.
She’s sitting by the telephone. She will never make the call that she needs to make, she knows that she will never make it, even though she knows it’s an important thing for her to do. She makes up reasons for doing it, and others for not doing it. There are a lot of good reasons for picking up the phone and saying who she is and what she wants, and there are a lot of good reasons for not letting someone turn her down and reject her, “It’s not the right day, it’s not the right time, I don’t know what to tell him, it’s no use, the secretary will tell me he’s in a meeting, I don’t feel well enough, he won’t take me, I am not good enough, I don’t have any experience, why should I leave my job, I like it where I am, I’m going to stutter, I would be better off writing to him first, and anyway it’s no use, he doesn’t know me.” She even manages to convince herself that it would be better to drop into his office instead of telephoning. But she knows she will never stop by his office, even though she’s trying, at the moment, to believe that she will.
Her breathing becomes laboured. She is having an anxiety attack. Without thinking, she goes to the fridge. A beer will help her think better, yes, that’s it, a beer to help her think about how to go about it.
With a very cold beer in her hand, she goes out onto the front balcony. It’s nice out and the sun is shining on the Mile End side of Hutchison Street, her side. She sits down, stretches out her legs, takes a big swig of beer, puts the bottle down on the low table next to her, closes her eyes, and lets the sun wash over her face. She prays to her gods, one at a time, to tell her what to do. What to do with her life.
In her mind, she imagines herself standing in front of the telephone with indescribable anxiety pressing down on her chest. She is ashamed of herself. A telephone,
a trivial little telephone. What is preventing me from moving forward, what is stopping me? She takes another mouthful, puts the cold bottle between her two small breasts, pushes hard against her solar plexus until it hurts. She waits, with her eyes closed.
In this particular instance, just saying “this is who I am, this is what I want” is as dangerous for Tamara as jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. When the time comes to make the last ditch effort to assert herself, to face up to her fears, to stand on her own two feet, she goes to get herself a beer, then a second one, and a third … and her anxieties vanish.
She has always been the kind of person that people look at, coddle, admire, and choose. A modern version of Sleeping Beauty. Living her life on a pedestal, up above the ground, she had avoided grappling with her problems. Until now, she has managed to live life as if she were surfing through it.
Nothing satisfied her. She had a high opinion of herself, but she lacked the self-confidence and tenacity to pursue what she really wanted. She didn’t even know what she wanted. She had lost her bearings, she no longer knew what she expected out of life, and even less what she expected from herself. She was no longer able to go with the flow, as she had done before, or else to spring into action to steer her life in another direction. To go for something, or someone, would involve risks she never wanted to take.
Since the disappearance of her father, and maybe even before, she had spent her life waiting. She waited for classes to end, for the boyfriend she didn’t love anymore to bugger off, for another guy to notice her and to fall madly in love with her. She waited for evening to come so she could go drinking, and in the morning she waited for her head to stop aching. She waited for her boring job to be over, to get her pay cheque so she could go blow it all. She would never admit it, but she was waiting for her father to return, even though she knew that she could never forgive him, that she would hold it against him until the day he died, and that she actually wished he were dead. She was waiting for a miracle. Any old miracle that would change her life.
Françoise Camirand
She flitted like a butterfly from one character to another, from her notebooks to her characters. From the street to her computer. She had files full of notes taken haphazardly as she read, as she walked around. She would grapple with one of the characters, then embrace one of the others. She was moving forward in baby st
eps. One word here, one sentence there. Rewrite a section, fix another, polish many …
Sentences, ideas, emotions and images swirled around in her brain pell-mell. In the time it took to decide which character went with each of these, they vanished … and then returned even more distinctly … She would then put them down on paper, telling them, “wait, your time will come.” By protecting them from oblivion, she felt calm, and so were they. Emotions can wait until we arouse them.
Characters appeared and took shape.
She continued to stroll up and down Hutchison Street, from Van Horne to Mont-Royal and back. Sometimes she took Park Avenue on the way home.
Each time she goes for a walk, she sings a different song. Today she has picked Mistral gagnant, a nostalgic piece in which the songwriter recalls walking in the rain by the seaside with his young daughter.3
For a change, she decides to take the back lane behind Hutchinson. That’s where she sees her. The old lady, standing on the edge of the laneway, is calling to the birds, concentrating so hard that it looks like this is the most important thing in the world.
Françoise has seen her in the neighbourhood hundreds of times, and although the old woman lives only four doors down, she has never seen her in action, in her own world.
Françoise remains hidden behind the fence and watches her for a long time. She hears her chirping well before she hears the birds. When they dive frantically to snatch bits of torn-up bread, the old lady’s face lights up with a breathtaking smile. She has the disarming look and movements of a happy little girl. As if her smile and innocent gestures alone could make the universe come to life.
Both laughable and dignified, this moment encapsulates all that is laughable and dignified in our world …
Thérèse Huot
She didn’t get this thing about loving your neighbour. At school, they had filled her head with the words of
Jesus Christ. His famous line “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” popped up more often than it deserved to. But it really didn’t mean anything to her. Thérèse Huot loved animals, and had always preferred them to humans. It didn’t sort itself out as she grew older either. Even now, with the exception of kids under five, she far preferred cats, birds, all animals without exception. She didn’t discriminate against any kind of animal, whether it was beautiful, ugly, old, injured, sick, flea-ridden, jumpy, thieving or aggressive. She even liked the weaker ones, the ones who weren’t able to fend for themselves. Each and every one of them had a right to her attention, to her affection, to her food, to her water, to her caring and stroking. The animals who hung around the Hutchison Street alley could sense that about her, and they knew where to go in case of need. They would even drop by, just like that, to greet the others, and to lick the kind and generous hands of their hostess.
After her husband died and her children disappeared, the old lady befriended the lonely and the hungry, but she lived alone. So there was no one left to tell her that she was going way too far, all that food costs a pile of money in the long run, and what good does it do, can you tell me that, with nothing to show for it but all that stinking shit to pick up, but go for it, if you like to work for nothing and throw your money out the window, that’s what I think anyways … Finally, she could live in peace … peace and quiet.
She never invited anyone over to her place except cats and dogs. The squirrels invited themselves over and, with an abundant supply of all kinds of seeds, the birds made permanent nests there. Most of the time, her visitors stayed in the yard and lounged around under the only tree she had, a Manitoba maple. She would go from one to the other, talking to them, stroking them, giving them something to eat or drink. She would sit down with them on the indestructible plastic chair she kept out there year round. In the winter, the balcony was a place where her guests could be more comfortable, and the kitchen was even better on very frosty nights.
Thérèse Huot never used the front door to go outside. She went out through the back and took the alley which was a few steps away from Park Avenue. Even in winter, she always managed to beat a path through the snow drifts, even though she ran the risk of hurting her back. The alley was an extension of her backyard, and she felt at home there, despite the garbage and the truck traffic which made it dangerous to walk. But she would do anything to discover an animal she didn’t know yet, and to crumble a few slices of the bread she always had stashed in her handbag, while making strange noises that attracted the birds and amused the truck drivers.
If the residents of Hutchison Street had seen her walking in their street, they would have mistaken her for a homeless person gone astray. Hutchison was not an elegant street. It was populated by all sorts of people and more and more Hasidim, but there were never any bums, vagrants or beggars. Those people usually kept to Park Avenue, where they would stand in front of the Dollarama, the Jean-Coutu drugstore or the SAQ liquor store with a paper coffee cup in their hand and all their worldly goods crammed into a battered suitcase on wheels. Each one had a different way of panhandling, of getting your attention, of saying thank you or uttering some other cliché, or of smiling to make you feel sorry for them as you went past. The regulars who did their shopping on Park Avenue knew them all by heart. Mysteriously, the donors and recipients selected one another. You ended up giving a few coins to your favourite, and you neglected others without even feeling guilty about it. Allah is great and God is just, someone else would look after those ones.
On Saturdays, and sometimes Sundays, there was a particular beggar who pitched up in the neighbourhood. She was not like the others. She would always stand in the same place, not in a doorway, but between Mile End Grocery and the drugstore, back from the sidewalk,
winter and summer, all day long. She wore clean clothes, she sported an imitation leather shoulder bag, her feet were firmly placed on the ground, and she stared straight out in front of her, motionless, without asking for anything, her hands clutching her coffee cup which she held tightly against her chest. She would stretch out her hand whenever anyone was about to offer her a coin, but then she would pull it back right away. In the winter, even after a helluva snowfall, when it was friggin’ cold out, she didn’t stamp her feet. She remained rooted there, always standing tall on a flattened cardboard box that she brought along to protect herself from the cold.
Thérèse Huot, too, had chosen her pet. She first saw the newcomer on a Saturday, wearing a fuchsia-coloured hat with a big pin on it in the shape of a cat. Thérèse came up and stood beside her, so as not to get in the way of any potential donors, and she asked her if she liked cats. And that did it! Every Saturday they picked up their conversation where they had left off the previous week. Cats, health, children, money, the cold, the heat – there were plenty of subjects for a good chinwag every week on the way to the stores and back again. After all, they saw each other only once a week. Madame Huot sometimes brought cookies she had picked up at Dollarama, her favourite store, along with a thermos she had also picked up at the dollar store and which she had filled to the brim with very hot and very sweet tea. She held on to the paper coffee cup while Madame Groulx was eating and drinking.
The image of these two women was disconcerting: standing next to one another, cup in hand, they chatted and chuckled while peering at the passersby. With their old-fashioned hats and eccentric way of dressing, they looked like two clowns who were making fun of other people, or else two panhandlers. And if they were begging, what on earth was so funny?
For those who regularly came to do their shopping on Park Avenue, the Saturday beggar was the Saturday beggar. But for Thérèse Huot, she became Madame Groulx, the only human being she had talked to since her husband died, not counting the few sentences she exchanged with shopkeepers or the two or three words she used to tell her neighbour to go to hell when she tried to preach to her about having too many animals in her yard.
Thérèse Huot had never dropped coins into Madame Groulx’s cup,
except for the first time, before she knew her. Not because she was stingy, but because she was embarrassed. They had become friends, and a loony tossed quickly into the coffee cup was worth nothing compared to the three and a half years of delightful chatter in good weather and in bad.
Thérèse Huot did not have a lot of money, but she felt rich because she lived her life exactly the way she wanted. Henri, her husband, had had only one good idea in his life: to buy the apartment where they lived. Apart from maintenance, taxes and other annoyances, it didn’t cost her anything to live there anymore. “I am a fat cat,” she reminded herself often. Her late husband’s pension and her old age pension were more than enough for her to feed herself and spoil all the critters who paid her a visit, to make donations to two organizations that protected animals, and to visit the Granby Zoo twice a year. Thérèse had worn the same beige raincoat in spring, summer, and fall for at least thirty years, and a brown winter coat with a fur collar that was timeworn and definitely moth-eaten. She had no needs, none whatsoever, and she couldn’t give a damn about the people who stared at her. As long as there were little creatures who came to see her, she was happy. And there were animals in the alley behind Hutchison Street alright, not counting her cats, Duchess, Tartine and Cavaleur, and her dog, Caboche.
Her children also dropped by from time to time. She would open her door to them whenever they popped in, but she didn’t much care one way or the other. Even though she had a preference for animals and pre-school children, and was not naturally drawn to adult human beings, she didn’t hate them either. “They’re my children, after all!” But she no longer had anything in common with them and the way they lived their lives. They bought and sold all kinds of things that were a mystery to her, they squirreled their money away in banks, and they acted super important. They came to visit her as if they were doing her a favour or as if they were doing their semi-annual good deed. Fine, they didn’t stay long. All three of them would roll in at the same time, more to meet one another than to see her. They talked about their affairs – it was all Greek to her – about their latest purchases, sailboats, cars and houses. She would never see any of that stuff, but in any case she didn’t give a shit.