Hutchison Street

by Abla Farhoud

  It was like a dream, or rather a nightmare. He could hear the hubbub. They were calling him, they were saying his name. It had been a long time since he had heard the sound of his own name. His confidence came back. He quickly dried his face off, pasted a smile on it and made his way into the living room. It was now or never.

  A few weeks later, Sylvain Tremblay was sitting in front of the television in his chaotic living room, which the camera crew had left in disarray. “Sorry, Monsieur Tremblay, we’re in a bit of a rush, you don’t mind, do you?” No, he had just wanted them to bugger off as soon as possible!

  When he saw himself, he was ashamed. A total loser. Pitiful. What’s more, what they were talking about was out of date, songs that didn’t mean anything anymore, even to him. They were playing excerpts they had dredged up from god knows where. So ridiculous. Enough to make you cry your eyes out. Not only was he ashamed to see how absolutely useless he was, but he also noticed that he’d become the spitting image of his mother. He had the same way of holding back the tears. It was scary. He had always been told that he looked like his father. What had happened to him in such a short time? And his nose, what had happened to his nose? He was overcome with emotion and his face was ablaze and contorted. It was pathetic. How he had aged! Wrinkles everywhere. And his smile, which everyone had complimented him on when he was young, was stiff and austere now. Luckily, he hadn’t shed any tears. Christ, that would have been the last straw, ludicrous beyond belief, the height of the absurd: an old singer crying over his past. There is nothing more lame than that. A tear on his swollen and blotchy nose … minus the wit and panache of a Cyrano.

  He turns the television off before the end of the credits. He has a bit of a stomach ache and feels like he’s going to puke. He takes a deep breath, as he used to do before going out on stage. He breathes in and out a few times while looking out the window. He calms down. He will never sing in public anymore. It’s over. He will plunk away on his guitar by himself, in his living room, to hear his own voice, his own words. He’ll sing for friends if they ask him to, but nothing more.

  Outside, two Hasidim are walking by. Each one has a cell phone glued to his ear. At least they have not seen the show. An older couple walks by, arm in arm. You can’t tell which one is propping the other up, but it’s all right, they’re getting around without too much trouble. Two young people are standing in the middle of the sidewalk with their arms around each other. They can’t stop kissing. He is moved as he watches them. He thinks of a song that he could write, exactly from this perspective.

  While his faded image was being displayed on one channel, a million other images were flooding the one hundred and eighty other channels. At that very moment, children were being born and others were dying of hunger and thirst, while he, Sylvain Tremblay, was fretting over a lousy thirty-minute show that had been plugged into the schedule of TVA.

  No.

  All of a sudden, he turns around and looks straight ahead into the room. He decides to tidy up his apartment. Neither sad nor joyful, he puts the pieces of furniture back in place. He feels almost light, as if an enormous weight has just slipped off his shoulders. Maybe that’s what they mean when they say that you have to reach rock bottom before you can find your way back up. His past has been put to rest once and for all thanks to this grotesque half-hour of television which has placed a tombstone over his years of waiting and hoping for nothing. It’s over. There’s no looking back. His future will be whatever he makes of it.

  The telephone rings. His first reflex is not to answer. What if a workmate has recognized him? He doesn’t feel up to talking about it. Then he changes his mind.

  “Yes, this is Sylvain Tremblay, yes … Thank you, that’s nice … Yes, yes, I know who you are, I often listen to your songs on the radio … I’m still writing, yes … You want to hear them? Why? … No, I’ve never thought about it, but why not? … I’ve done a hundred or so … You want to come around? … Yes, a home recording, of course. I’ll sing you the other ones and play my guitar … I’m here, you can come right over. I live in Mile End.”

  He gives the person his address, hangs up and continues to rearrange things in his living room. “How stupid can I be! All these years, I’ve been an idiot, fighting this useless battle. I’ve had a one-track mind, that’s what. I’ve had blinders on. I’ve never looked left or right, I’ve just spent my time banging my head against a brick wall. I’ve been obsessive, to say the least. It never even occurred to me. It’s incredible. Dear God, let other people sing my friggin’ tunes. “A lyricist is a writer who sings,” as the French songwriter Pierre Delanoë used to say. He was right. And I know how to compose music as well. Terrific! I will finally hear my songs. If they’re sung by other people, so be it. I will finally hear them. Yes, yes, yes!

  He was still laughing when the doorbell rang.

  The Actresses

  A few doors down from Bernard, on the Mile End side of the street, there was a second-floor apartment in a building with a spiral staircase. They called it the actresses’

  apartment. One actress would arrive, live there for a few years, and then disappear. Another one would move in, live there for a time, and then vanish in turn, leaving room for the next one. There were never any male actors or ordinary people. Always actresses.

  There was never a sign saying “apartment for rent.” And yet, the apartment never stayed empty. You would think the place belonged to the Artists Union and that it was awarded through a competition process, but open to female actors only because it would have been surprising that no male actor had won the competition in forty years. A lot of actors came around as friends or lovers, or with a script in hand to rehearse, but none of them came as tenants.

  Some of the actresses were well known thanks to television, while others worked in the theatre and were not known to the general public. When you saw how discreet and self-effacing they looked doing their shopping on Park Avenue, working out at the YMCA, or running in their jogging pants year-round, you wouldn’t have believed they were able to face large audiences in the theatres of Montreal, where they had nonetheless played important roles at one time or another. All of the women who had lived in the apartment, one after the other, had enjoyed successful careers on the stage, on television or in the movies. Some of them continued to act, while others had given up the business, or rather the business had given up on them. The ones who had lived here in the 1970s or 1980s were now fifty or sixty years old, or more … “There are not a lot of parts for people our age, the most difficult thing in our business is to survive.” That’s what they all say, pretty much in those words, when they have the opportunity to speak in public.

  In the neighbourhood, they go unnoticed. None of them was a big star, but they were all accomplished artists, well regarded by their peers. None of them signed autographs, not even the day after a big opening at a company such as the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. In this diverse neighbourhood, there are few francophones, and even fewer theatre-goers.

  None of the actresses fit the exuberant image usually associated with performers. Except when one of them ran into someone from her own circle on the street. It would take no longer than one second for all traces of the unassuming and discreet persona to vanish. It was an instant transformation. The woman with her head down in the grocery store or some other place would become an

  actress in all her glory, playing her seduction scene from act one, two or three, at the corner of Bernard and Hutchison. Her voice would ring out, her eyes would shine, and she would make sweeping gestures. It would depend, of course, on the person she was facing and on what she had to gain from using her charm in this improvised form of theatre. Perhaps it wasn’t to “gain” anything at all. Instead, it might have been the sheer pleasure of running into a friend, of being recognized by someone, of being totally herself and rediscovering the multiple personality traits that can only be deployed among people of like mind.

&n
bsp; A few days ago, a new tenant moved into the actresses’ apartment. She is the complete opposite of her colleagues, in that she is constantly performing. As soon as she walks down the stairs, she looks around to see who is watching her. She pretends she is on the red carpet, she hears the paparazzi snapping pictures of her and she pictures a crowd of admirers waiting for her to sign her photograph.

  Younger than all the others who have preceded her, she is flamboyant, made up, with her hair deliberately tousled, carefully and stylishly dressed … just to go to the corner store.

  As if there were a camera to the right of the cash register, she strikes an affected pose, but the cashier is in a hurry and serves her without a glance. She wiggles her pretty derrière as she strolls along and goes back up to the apartment building. Before going inside, she turns around as if to go down the stairs again, she leans on the balcony railing, scans the street, and then shrugs her shoulders with a defeated look. No one has noticed her. She spins around and goes in.

  She is not expected to last long in this motley neighbourhood, which is sure to dampen her spirits. Considering that seventy-five per cent of the people are Hasidim, who don’t look at anyone, it would come as no surprise if depression got the best of the young actress sooner or later.

  Madeleine Desrochers

  Madeleine Desrochers was definitely a happy person. Since she was a teenager, she had known where she was going and what would make her happy: looking after people in need.

  She took pleasure in giving. The more she gave, the more she had to give. She thrived on giving to others and giving of herself. She didn’t need anything else to be happy, and she didn’t expect compliments or gratitude. Of course, she liked it when people said thank you, but she didn’t expect more than that. When her work paid off, she was delighted, but she was not discouraged by failure either. Quite the contrary. It meant that there was still a lot to do, and she was determined to do as much as she possibly could.

  Right up until the day when she fell to the ground like a ton of bricks, unable to get up again on her own.

  Amateur psychologists, and even real ones, would have said that Madeleine Desrochers didn’t know her limits, that she had gone too far, and that by looking after others she had neglected herself.

  She, on the other hand, was convinced that the way she lived her life was perfectly consistent with her nature, that her energy was renewable, that her strength could be renewed by a good night’s sleep, and that even if she was satisfied with what she had already accomplished, she could always do better.

  There was so much to do!

  She worked as a nurse, she volunteered to help young alcoholics and drug addicts, and she launched a foundation that provided aid for children in Togo and Benin. That was her life. Her whole life.

  Madeleine Desrochers was like some artists. She did not lose herself in her work. Instead, work was a form of self-expression.

  What more can you ask of life if you are happy? What more can you ask for when you are fulfilling your dreams every day and accomplishing what you have set out to do?

  When disaster struck, she lost her flexibility and strength all at once. She had bent down to pick up a small battery-operated radio that a patient had accidentally dropped. She had one knee on the floor, with one arm stretched out under the bed to pick it up. She began to tremble and her right knee swelled up before her very eyes. She then felt what seemed like an electric shock in her back and hips and she was overcome by indescribable pain. It was Madame Therrien, the patient, who rang for help again and again, while Madeleine tried to get up, to no avail.

  When she was born, she was blessed with constant energy and an unusually strong mental and physical constitution. She was cheerful and always looked on the bright side of things. She got by with only six hours of sleep, after which she was once again in gear. If you had seen her striding down the hallways of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, you would never have believed she was already fifty-two years old.

  Believe it or not, even though she had always spent time with sick people and sickness, Madeleine Desrochers didn’t know what it was like to be sick herself. Not really. A few colds, a flu once in a while, that was the sum total of her personal maladies. She had never dreamt that one day, she, too, would perhaps …

  When she was a child, she had seen her mother suffer, often in bed, while her father was the picture of health, until the day he dropped dead suddenly. Madeleine had inherited her father’s genes. Her mother had said to her one day, “I don’t wish it upon you, my dear, God knows I don’t wish it upon you, but you won’t really understand until your own body is affected.” She often thought about her mother now that her body had given up on her.

  Irony number one: This was the first time that she had been a guinea pig in the convoluted maze of the health-care system. With her nightgown open at the back, and her bum exposed, lying on a stretcher pushed about by strangers, high-spirited Madeleine was in too much pain to be in good spirits, so much so that she wanted to cry instead.

  Irony number two: She was surrounded by doctors, specialists of all sorts, and she knew them all well. They were competent all right, but no one could tell her

  exactly what was wrong with her. She took a battery of tests, of course, and was scrutinized by the most sophisticated machinery. Each doctor sent her on to the next, until they ran out of colleagues to send her to. They didn’t agree with one another. The words rheumatoid and acute attack were repeated the most often. But she was convinced that she had picked up a lousy infection or virus that had not yet been identified, a nasty bug that was causing her a lot of pain. Tabarouette, as her father used to say, to avoid actually swearing. A royal pain in the arse. Although they didn’t have a precise diagnosis, they did give her anti-inflammatories and powerful pain-killers. There was a shortage of beds, so they politely released her from hospital, plunked her in a taxi, and told her to get plenty of rest, as if she was capable of doing anything else.

  Irony number three: Had it not been for the young person from Togo who had been living with her for a year, Madeleine Desrochers, who had helped so many people all her life, would have been up shit creek without a paddle, as people used to say back in her home town.

  Madeleine had been living on her own since she had lost the love of her life at the age of thirty-nine. Since then, she had had a fling or two, but nothing out of this world, nothing good enough to replace her first love, in any case. And then, there was no one in her life anymore. She had a lot of women friends. But friendships, like patients, need to be looked after, as she well knew. Her friends were not needy, and they had other friends, but the young druggies and the children in Togo and Benin only had her. Gradually, the telephone stopped ringing. And it was not because Madeleine now had time on her hands, lots of time, because she could no longer walk down the four steps of her staircase, that her friends would start coming around again, as if by magic.

  She didn’t hold it against them and she had no regrets. It was her life. The life she had chosen.

  She was forced to retire and, since then, her body and her mind had become an occupied territory, taken over by illness. She would be crushed by acute pain, when she wasn’t feeling totally comatose. She had a lot of trouble moving around and a sharp pain would shoot down her body even when she was lying down. Her aches and pains were nearly unbearable and drained the little energy she had left. Intense fatigue – that strange thing she had known only by name – had insidiously conquered her entire body and even altered her mind.

  She had the feeling that her real life was already behind her. In the years she had left, a reprieve, she would lead a life that was foreign to her, but she had to get used to it, for lack of anything better.

  The question that she didn’t dare ask was, “Am I going to be like this for the rest of my days?”

  After the death of her beloved Jacques, Madeleine had shared her Hutchison Street apartment with
her friend Irene, who was also a nurse. Not long after, Irene left to go live and work in Togo with her new husband, who was a male nurse originally from there. Since then, Madeleine had been taking in students as boarders. There was a bedroom and sitting room separated by a sliding door, also known as a double living room. It was very cheap and rarely stayed empty. Her apartment was long and narrow, as is often the case on Hutchison, which made it easy for young tenants to feel at home and invite friends in. There was a common washroom and tenants had access to the kitchen, where they could even invite a gang over for supper. On condition that they let Madeleine know in advance. She almost always agreed. She liked young people. And they liked her. They would include her, she would have a drink with them, have a bite, and then leave them alone while she slipped into her room where she had her books and a second television set. The large kitchen would come to life again, just like the days when Jacques was still alive and they entertained a lot. She would listen to them talking and laughing and she couldn’t have been happier had they been her own children. The next morning, when she went into the kitchen to have breakfast at her table beside the window, everything would be spic and span, the dishes washed, the beer and wine bottles disposed of in the recycling bin. The students were always the ones who took the recycling and garbage bags out. The rules of the house were clear and everything was tickety-boo. Madeleine wondered why adults complained about young people. The ones who had lived with her had always kept their word.