Hutchison Street

by Abla Farhoud

  Martine Saint-Amant

  She read to escape.

  From the time she woke up until the minute she fell asleep, and sometimes in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, she read detective novels. It was the only kind of book that she could stand, the only thing she was able to do. She was captivated by crime fiction, which gave her pleasure, gave her the impression of travelling and allowed her to stop thinking about what had happened to her.

  Reading was the only thing she had found to offset the crushing weight of her pain.

  She read while lying on the living room couch, sitting at the kitchen table and sipping a coffee or nibbling on something, reclining amid cushions and pillows in her bedroom, soaking in her bath, or ensconced in an easy chair in her TV room with the television turned off. She even read when she went to the bathroom. But never in her office, or her husband’s office.

  She read while waiting for things to blow over.

  Before she became a detective book addict, wandering from room to room to find a new position and to rest her eyes, Martine Saint-Amant used to work in a very nice communications firm downtown. She was not the type to be outdone, and she worked flat out in order to compete with the young go-getters who were breathing down her neck. She overextended herself so much that she snapped. She had a burn-out. On doctor’s orders, she went on stress leave and took time off to rest. They said “burn-out” in the workplace instead of depression, making it sound more exotic and less like a mental illness. If you were burned out, it simply meant that your motor was burned out from working your butt off. You had bust your ass for the company, so much so that you could pat yourself on the back and boast about what you had accomplished.

  Good things come in pairs, as the expression goes. They also say that it never rains but it pours. Her husband left her the same week. It didn’t come out of the blue, it had been building up for a long time. She had been living with her husband, her second husband actually, for nearly ten years, and she had wanted to be with him forever.

  She was back to square one, an expression that used to make her smile at one time.

  Martine Saint-Amant had always been an avid reader. She was passionate about books. Since she was a little girl, reading had been not just her favourite pastime, but her daily bread. Even after a day at the office, when she came home feeling tired and harried, she always found the time and energy to read, if only a few pages. She would read all sorts of things, but especially the intense, deep and questioning novels that unsettle all your ideas. She liked the sometimes painful experience of diving deep into her soul by reading the work of writers who were spilling their guts, who were tearing their hearts out to try to find the meaning of life with words that were infinitely beautiful, almost poetic.The meaning of her own life had just been seriously toppled, which meant that she could no longer open that kind of book without feeling nauseous. She had enough turmoil in her own life. She didn’t need to add any more. The slightest nudge, or any further emotion, would push her over the edge.

  But she missed reading. The act of reading, and the object, too. She liked knowing that a book was waiting for her, for you are never alone knowing that there’s a good book waiting. Reading in any old place, at any time, in any position, without making any noise, without bothering anyone. She loved to hug the rectangular pile of pages pressed one against the other, with many words written black on white, and sail away on uncharted waters, exploring herself or other people. When she was little, she used to say, “I like reading too much.” Now that she was grown up, the “too much” had stuck with her.

  Before her infatuation with detective novels, she had read one or two books by Agatha Christie, one or two by Simenon. She had liked them, but she was not hooked. And then one day, a miracle happened. About two weeks had gone by since her husband had left her, since she had quit her job, and since her girlfriends had gone back to work after paying her a couple of visits of support. Home alone in her Hutchison Street condo, her eyes were puffy and red, she felt weak and defeated, and she had no appetite. She was going around in circles, all by herself. She was at loose ends, and she didn’t know what to do with her life. She rummaged through her bookcases looking for a book to distract her a bit. The screenwriters for Desperate Housewives would have had trouble filling five minutes of air time with Martine Saint-Amant, who was just a shadow of her former self, much too dull, as her mother might have said, but she wasn’t there to comfort her because, “Mascouche, you know, isn’t a stone’s throw away from Montreal, not when the car is in the garage because your father got into an accident, and anyway, if you would only stop crying, dear, a good-for-nothing like him isn’t that hard to replace, anyways …”

  The anti-depressants were not working. She felt a continual upheaval inside her chest, as if she were being sliced into strips by a razor. Each sharp blade had a colour and texture of its own, and quivered in a different way. She had spent ten years of her life with him. At first, they were crazy about each other. Then their relationship grew deeper, then more laid back. They vowed they would grow old together, until all hell broke loose. “What did I do to deserve this?” She got no relief, even with the antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.

  A miracle occurred when a friend left a book at her place – Have Mercy On Us All by the French crime writer Fred Vargas. It was love at first sight. During the long hours she spent with Chief Inspector Jean-Baptiste

  Adamsberg and Captain Adrien Danglard she didn’t feel any pain. She felt great. She began to regain some of the concentration that had gone missing for quite some time. Even before she finished reading the book, she rushed to the Mile End library to take out everything she could find about the Commissaire’s investigations. Then she got into Harry Bosch, then Kurt Wallander, and more.

  Little by little, she became detached from real life and immersed in the world of crime fiction. She was particularly interested in the people who investigated the crimes: inspectors, lieutenants, detectives, sergeant-detectives, private eyes, captains, chief inspectors, depending on the book she was reading. The authors didn’t really matter much to her. She was more interested in the protagonists – and sometimes their partners. She soon forgot that these characters had been invented by someone who was an author. She became attached to Bosch, Erlendur, Montalbano, John Rebus, Frédéric Fontaine, Wallander, Adam Dalgliesh, Varg Veum, Victoria I. Warshawski, Harry Hole, Jessica Balzano, Kevin Byrne, Jack Reacher, Easy Rawlins, Scuder, Pepe Carvalho and so many others.

  Each of these detectives, who knocked themselves out trying to track down the guilty party, became closer to her than a brother or a friend. She followed their movements step by step through moments of discouragement, hope or jubilation. For hundreds of pages and during the countless hours she spent reading, she accompanied the detectives just as they kept her company. Sometimes she forgot that she was reading. She was so engrossed in the story that her heart would skip a beat whenever the plot took an exciting or alarming turn.

  For her, a detective novel portrayed real life in all its horror and beauty. Perhaps even more than the books she had read before. In those books, life was packaged and edited by the author, but these just described the ordinary life of a guy or sometimes a woman who were just doing their job. Life unfolded with its problems and questions, without any pretence of revolutionizing literature, and yet there would be some passages that took your breath away. The only difference between fiction and real life was that in these books you ended up knowing who was guilty. Yes, that was the good part, you knew who was guilty, but in detective novels that also meant that you had finished reading the book. What she found most exciting was getting there. She loved the ups and downs and the surprises along the way.

  Before falling in love with detective novels, she had thought they were all of the same quality. She wouldn’t have admitted it, but she once had a certain disdain for this type of writing. When she discovered the hidden jewels of
some masterpiece, she was bowled over. It reminded her of something Quebec singer Félix Leclerc had once said about ignorance breeding contempt.

  Detective novels, like all literary genres, ranged in quality. Some of them had glaring errors, inconsistencies, sloppy style, but she didn’t give a damn. If she didn’t know the detective yet, if she wasn’t yet attached to him, she would put the book aside and reach for another one. On the other hand, the more she got to know the main character, the more she would disregard flaws in the plot or the writing style the same way you would forgive the faults of a friend, because you know he will come back to his senses, and be the same person you knew and loved. She knew what would happen, so she always had a stack of books waiting for her. The Mile End library was well stocked, the librarians were very nice, and the library itself was only minutes from home. There were also four bookstores, including a used bookshop on Saint-Viateur.

  When she started a new book, a new adventure with a detective she was familiar with, she was just as exhilarated as if she was going to meet a lover she hadn’t seen for a long time.

  Even though she didn’t think about it all the time, she was aware of the fact that crime fiction had saved her life. It had at least dragged her out of the quicksand into which she had been sinking for several months. Each mystery distracted her from her personal quest, gave her some respite from herself, gave her the time to rest and the time to heal.

  She could experience emotional upheaval and return to her own life at any time while she was reading. A father who found his son again, a mother who was looking for her child, or a mere thank you, a tender gesture of recognition. It could be the emotion of the detective as he came to terms with so much horror, with his powerlessness and his fatigue. It could be anything. She didn’t know and she didn’t ask questions. She would feel her throat tighten. She would stop right in the middle of a sentence and she would cry, cry, cry, without knowing for whom or for what reason. With her left hand, she would rest the open book on her chest – most of the time she used to read lying down – and with her right hand placed over her eyes, she would continue to sob. Then she would wave her hand around trying to dry her eyes, as if she was spreading face cream over her entire face and as if the lotion were made of salt water. And, without changing positions, without feeling sorry for herself and asking “why, dear God, why,” she would start reading again, the way a drunk reaches for his glass, or a druggie takes a toke or shoots up, to try to escape the unbearable just a bit.

  Françoise Camirand

  Procrastination. A word that’s hard to pronounce. Marcel Proust borrowed it from English, and then popularized it when he made it one of the primary themes of In Search of Lost Time. All writers, essayists, script writers and playwrights are familiar with procrastination, and fall prey to it, except Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Nancy Huston, Stéphane Laporte, Ismail Kadare, and … Françoise Camirand.

  She never put off till tomorrow what she could do today. Quite the opposite. She did things today which could easily wait until tomorrow. She was a workhorse, with iron discipline, and she worked three hundred days a year, five or six hours a day, sometimes more, without slacking off. Not counting the time she spent reading up on the subject of the book she was working on.

  But for the past two or three days, nothing has been the same on Hutchison Street, at least not in Françoise Camirand’s study and head. Perhaps it was because she had taken a liking to her long walks through the neighbourhood. She paced and protested like a caged lioness.

  She would sit down at her desk, take a peek at her computer, make a face, stand up again, grab a coffee to give her energy, survey her plants and trim them (although there were actually no more yellow leaves to pluck off), drink a cup of tea to stimulate the creative juices, look out the window, put on some music, change CDs, turn it off again, then come back to take another peek at her characters. And then the cycle of coffee, tea, plants and looking out the window would start over again.

  She was not her usual self. This had not happened to her for a long time. Even more dangerous, her characters seemed both strange and foreign to her. As if all the affinity, fondness and love she had originally felt for them had dissipated. All at once.

  Procrastination was turning into discouragement of the worst kind as she lost sight of the importance of her work. She no longer knew why she was writing. Danger! Handle with care! There were too many bad memories associated with this kind of slump.

  She even quarrelled with Jean-Hugues. She got worked up. “It was YOUR idea, not mine. If you want to publish an autobiography, write your own and leave me alone!” He walked out and slammed the door. What babies they were! To be honest, she was taking it out on him. Unhappy with her work, she was looking for a fight. She would have picked a fight with the storekeeper, the mailman, anybody, but he happened to be the one. He talked for the sake of talking, the poor guy, he didn’t want to make her do anything. Quite the contrary. He just wanted to talk about Gabrielle Roy’s autobiography, Enchantment and Sorrow, which he was rereading, and he had accidentally let slip the idea that Françoise could write her own biography, nothing more. But this wasn’t the right time to talk about the past, which she had been struggling with for a few days.

  She felt distraught, not so much because of the fight with Jean-Hugues – doors had been slammed many times over the years – but because of the terrible feeling that was weighing her down. She was haunted by her younger days, the time before she began writing … As if things were floating, as if everything was becoming foreign, as if life no longer had any texture or meaning. It was a state of mind she feared, because she had been there before. It would be so easy to slip into the cycle of self-destruction once again, it would be the next step … Just because she had changed obsessions, it didn’t mean that she was no longer obsessive. She knew what it was like, to let everything go down the toilet.

  After Jean-Hugues left, she was still fuming. She had to do something, before everything went to hell in a handcart! She had to break out of her cell immediately. She took her handbag and went out. Around her, the street was teeming with life. It was like a remedy for her, it helped her to put things into perspective, to get her head screwed on straight, to give herself a kick in the ass. Stagnation is a kind of demon. Move, do something! When she was younger, she would have taken a drink, then another and another. But those days were over now.

  Drawing inspiration from one of her favourite songs, Toujours vivant, she decided to grab hold of the lifebuoy.4 It was a song that celebrated making a mark in this world, never giving up. The words echoed in her head. She just muttered them at first. It was a reflex, she sang without much conviction, but she was soon carried away by the song’s ebb and flow. She felt like a fool singing out loud in the middle of the street, but it was a much smaller risk than the one she had just averted. She walked all the way over to Pratt Park, circled it two or three times. She took Fairmount on the way back and rang Jean-Hugues’s doorbell.

  Jean-Hugues Briançon

  Since coming to Quebec, his vocabulary had been enriched by countless Québécois expressions: words like niaiser, maganer, achaler … gougoune, moumoune, guidoune,5 and the swearwords so typical of Quebec – all of them related to religion. And then there were the words specifically pertaining to winter, like bancs de neige, sloche, glace noire and poudrerie.6 He was a quick learner and he loved the distinctive flavour of Quebec French. He would say “tu m’aimes-tu?” because he adored Richard Desjardin’s song and found that the repetition of the pronoun tu made the question stronger and more precise. He was able to recognize quality of speech, inventiveness, register and regional variations in Quebec French. With time, his ear became more attuned and he formed certain preferences. Among his many projects, he planned to publish a collection of his favourite Quebec terms and expressions, which he had started jotting down as soon as he arrived in Quebec in 1975, and even a bit earlier when he fell in love with a beautiful Q
uebec woman, whom he had subsequently followed. He wasn’t the following type of guy, but isn’t love a good excuse for changing course?

  Jean-Hugues landed in Montreal on the eve of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, accompanied by Louise Lavallée, who was doing her doctorate in French literature. It was crazy, it was festive. Montreal appealed to him instantly. Those were heady times in Quebec and its artists were on fire. And he adored artists.

  Although Jean-Hugues’s love life soon turned sour, and Louise wanted to return to France as soon as possible because she couldn’t stand the Québécois, who were country bumpkins in her view, Jean-Hugues decided to stay. He liked the Québécois, whom he found feisty, because for centuries they had resisted and refused to be assimilated by the English majority, and had steadfastly preserved their language and culture. He immediately and wholeheartedly embraced their struggle.

  He went home to France to apply for immigration, to see his parents and to finish what he had to finish.

  He was twenty-five years old. He was ready for anything and everything, and life in Quebec suited him perfectly, including the cold and interminable winters. Here, he could be what he wanted to be, do what he wanted to do, and become what he wanted to become. The sense of freedom that had prompted him to immigrate was in fact a sense of relaxation. His shoulders loosened up and went back to normal, he became less tight-assed, and his creativity soared.