Hutchison Street

by Abla Farhoud

  He had read everything and he could make verbal mincemeat out of any smarty-pants, teachers included, who came along. A walking encyclopedia, he would mesmerize them with his vast knowledge of everything, although that wouldn’t prevent the stupid louts from treating him like a fairy for the same reasons.

  But he knew that the long hours he spent reading alone, which gave him a lot of pleasure, would one day do more for him that just that. They would pay off. Oh, yes, they would pay off! Those who were laughing today, who had been humiliating him since he was a child, would very soon be “eating their own shit,” as he saw it.

  “One day you’ll see, you’ll see, mes tabarnaks …” How many times had he chanted this mantra to himself, how many times had he repeated the words with those very guys in mind, the ones who had pissed him off and made fun of him, who had looked down their nose at him or scorned him. His outbursts were peppered with tabernacles, hosties, ciboires and calices. Although his vocabulary was rich enough to keep up with hip hop artists like Loco Locass, he preferred to use the religious swearwords of Quebec, which was the only way he knew to express his rage fully and find a bit of relief from the dumb thugs who humiliated him relentlessly.

  When he was young, he didn’t know how to enjoy the insults yet. First, he had to be successful. And he swore that he would succeed. That he would triumph, even.

  This morning, while listening to the excited boor on the radio, Albert wasn’t swearing. It was a treat. When people said or wrote bad things about him, or sent him insulting letters, packages of shit, he was ecstatic. He revelled in the violent harangue, the low-class outpouring, the unimpressive settling of scores, and hoped that it would go on forever. It was music to his ears, like Glenn Gould playing Bach fugues … He smiled. He stretched his limbs as he lay in bed, happy.

  You could say that there was nothing attractive about Albert’s face, except his smile, which few people had seen. His smile was possibly the only thing he had hung on to from childhood, from the pre-school years when his mother found him beautiful. His smile was a tiny bit coy, a bit shy, a bit love-me-I-am-lovable-I-swear. Without the smile, he would have looked like a gnome. He had the outward appearance of a gnome, but, above all, he was shrewd and perceptive – defining qualities in those little deformed creatures that inhabit the interior of the Earth and guard its treasures … or else transform them at will into their opposites.

  When Albert Dupras began working as a journalist –

  before his success went to his head – everyone recognized his intelligence and vast general knowledge. He was one of those rare critics who could write a penetrating and sound analysis that would shed light on a particular work and put it into perspective. Whether you agreed with what he said or not, you had to hand it to him and admire his elegant style.

  But in order to become well known and to ensure that people would go on talking about him, he had to go a bit further. He was intelligent enough to know that people often confuse being nice and being insipid, that being nice does not earn you respect, and that small people kowtow to those they fear. It was clear that to be successful, to shine, he had to be controversial. Now that he had proven that he was good, very good, he had to show that he was the best, indisputably, like the French critics he adored, whom he read diligently and whom he wanted to imitate. So he had to start rocking the boat and shining the spotlight on himself.

  He knew how to turn a phrase, and he wrote well, so he was able to cut anyone down with just a few words. But what he did was more subtle and yielded greater dividends as far as getting attention was concerned. He would praise an artist to the hilt, portray him in superlatives worthy of a god, and then, after the next performance, with one swift blow, knock him off the pedestal on which he himself had placed him. Without any artistic justification. It surprised people and got them talking. “He’s probably right,” they would say. “Oh, do you think so?” “Well, come on, he knows what he’s talking about, he’s the best!”

  At the beginning, he was just testing the waters. He didn’t know that it would work out so well. When he said that someone or another was a genius, he actually meant it, and when he pulled the rug out from under their feet after the next show, he had his reasons. Perhaps the performer in question hadn’t smiled at him, or else hadn’t said thank you. Or was it just to have a bit of fun? For the pleasure of seeing panic in the eyes of the people he ran across. For the sense of power it gave him. Which he began to love, quite a lot, deeply.

  He got tougher. He began to attack artists personally and dig into their personal lives. With a well-turned phrase, sometimes with sexual overtones. Of course, he was very gentle, at the beginning. But he saw that his tactics were beginning to pay off. People were talking about him. More and more. Oh, the happiness.

  Gradually, the two things that mattered the most to him – doing a good job and making sure people were talking about him – got switched around. It became more important, far more important, for people to talk about him. He was on the verge of becoming a celebrity.

  “One day you’ll see, mes tabarnaks.” They say that revenge is a dish that’s best served cold, but revenge also has a way of whetting your appetite. He was never satisfied.

  People were afraid of him and people hated him. Nevertheless, they read what he wrote, they responded to his articles. He had become THE authority, now that he had power. Power, or rather a feeling of power, is like a hard drug, just as bad as heroin. Although heroin is widely decried, once you have experienced its power, you give in. Once you get a taste of it, it is hard to do without, especially if the substance gives you what you have been seeking for a long time. Controlling the fate of other people can be a source of incredible pleasure. Seeing the impact of a few words you have written can give you such a kick, such a high. Especially seeing fear in the eyes of artists. Yes, just seeing fear in other people can be such a thrill.

  The power he had in his circle was so great that even he could not believe the devastation he caused. Highly talented artists were defeated, crushed, reduced to tears. Critics writing for other papers were no longer important. People read them but didn’t really pay much attention to what they were saying. There was only one legitimate opinion, like the sacred message propagated by a single evangelist, the gospel according to Albert Dupras. His reviews – both good and bad – wreaked havoc

  because people believed what he said. And so did he. He had fallen into his own trap.

  The day when no one wanted to have anything more to do with his power and he was forbidden from entering a theatre or concert hall, he felt as if he had hit the jackpot. It was unhoped for. How could he, Quebec’s greatest critic, be prevented from carrying out his duties? He was the victim now, a role that he was even more familiar with than the executioner’s role. He wasn’t going to let them get the best of him, oh no, you’ll see, mes tabarnaks, you’ll soon see my true colours, you haven’t seen anything yet. He bought a ticket and went in. Incognito. He had always had courage to burn since he was a child and he had always been galvanized by adversity, as long as it wasn’t physical.

  A star was born, people were saying, using the English cliché. Albert Dupras was invited to speak on panels and was a guest on all the talk shows. He had become more famous than many of the entertainers he had either demolished or praised to the hilt – always one extreme or the other – to provoke indignation and stir things up, to generate controversy and hold people’s attention.

  It was glorious. Even more amazing than he could have dreamed of. The assholes who had tormented him back in Jonquière didn’t read the papers, for sure, but they would have seen him on television, les calices. He was anxious to go back home to see his mother, if only to see the look on the stupid, uneducated faces of those morons.

  He waits for the interview to end and then gets up, humming a tune. There’s no one with him this morning. He came home alone last night. He’s been afraid since he was beat up and mugg
ed by a young hoodlum. No matter how much he delights in verbal violence, he dreads physical violence. He has been terrorized since the age of six, when he was knocked down on an icy sidewalk, held down by two strong arms, with legs all around him, and snow in his eyes, in his ears and down his neck. He completely loses control at the least sign of aggression. He sometimes wonders how he managed to get through his childhood and teenage years without dying. Without giving in to fear.

  He makes a pot of coffee, drinks two cups one after the other, without eating. He puts on the first t-shirt he can lay his hands on, which is spread out on the back of a chair, and steps into a pair of beige shorts that he hasn’t washed for a long time. He hurries out to pick up the papers at the corner store, as he does every morning.

  He has been living on Hutchison Street for two years, but he hasn’t met anyone he knows, except the actresses who live across the street. He thought it was best to leave them out of the picture. He runs down the stairs, turns left, and sees a man leaning against the wall of the TD Bank three doors up from his house. He recognizes him. “Oh my god, he knows where I live and has been waiting for me to go out.” The man smiles at him. It was a smile that gave him goose bumps.

  He quickly crosses the street so that he doesn’t have to pass by the man, then he turns onto Bernard and goes over to Park Avenue. Once he’s got the newspapers under his arm, instead of turning around and going directly home, he goes south on Park Avenue. He walks briskly, past the YMCA on the corner of Saint-Viateur. His heart is beating so fast that he fears his chest will explode. When he gets back to Hutchison he slows down. The man must still be there.

  He had had so much fun denigrating this guy. He had talked about his pretty face rather than his acting ability. He had written that young Boissonneau would have been better off getting a job in a night club for single women, wiggling his pretty butt around all night, because that’s all he knew how to do, instead of massacring Molière and insulting the audience’s intelligence.

  Had he gone too far? No. The guy was a bad actor. Albert Dupras knew that, more than anyone else. Albert Dupras was the best critic, and what he found bad was actually bad because he had seen it with his own eyes. He had thought it with his own brain, and had written it up in the newspaper.

  “Perhaps I overdid it, perhaps I could have put it differently. But I was right. I know I was right. I am paid for that. To be right.”

  From a distance, he can see the actor in the same position, his back against the wall and his right leg crossed over his left leg. He hasn’t budged an inch. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” Albert begins to shake uncontrollably.

  It didn’t occur to him, not for one second, that he could have taken the alleyway to sneak into his house through the back door …

  Xaroula and her Sisters

  Even before Xaroula was born, the Koutsoukis family had a clan of girls and a clan of boys. The eldest and the second eldest girls already formed a solid duo when the three boys were born, close together. When Xaroula, the youngest, was born, her two big sisters took her under their wing. Not that the boys were mean to her, on the contrary, but that’s the way it was, the girls stuck with the girls and the boys with the boys.

  Over the years, the relations between the girls and boys stayed the same. The girls got along well with each other and each boy got along with the other boys. There were no quarrels between the clans, although they were not attached to one another either. You could say that there were two families in one.

  The brothers and sisters did not see each other often. When their parents were still alive, the whole family got together a few times a year, for Christmas and New Year’s and especially for Greek Orthodox Easter. Once their father died and then their mother, the two clans split further apart. The boys had attended their parents’ funerals, but they had behaved like third cousins and hadn’t lifted a finger to help with the arrangements for the service or reception. In any case, their two older sisters wouldn’t have let them do anything. Each member of the family reverted to the role they had always assumed: the two older girls looked after everything and the youngest cried; the boys waited for it to be over, while drinking, eating and handing out their business cards. It’s surprising how many people you see only at funerals.

  The three-storey house had been bought by their father at the beginning of the 1970s. He had been a prosperous businessman and had worked tirelessly until the day he dropped dead, when his worn-out heart just stopped beating. Their mother passed away more recently. The Koutsoukis family lived on the ground floor and rented out the two upper floors to strangers – they referred to all those who were not Greek as strangers. The four youngest had been born in the house. Over the years, they had all left to get married, travel, escape from the grip of the family, and live their lives. Everyone except Xaroula, the youngest.

  After CEGEP, Xaroula wasn’t at all interested in going on to university, but she was even less tempted to go out to work. She had no girlfriends and no boyfriend, she didn’t go out, she never went to the movies or anywhere else. For unknown reasons, she didn’t aspire to get married, have children, or anything else. She had kept the room she had as a schoolgirl and the habits that went along with it. She was willing to go out to get the groceries once a week and she would do one or two errands at the corner grocery store, without having her arm twisted to do so. Other than that, she would spend her days sitting in the big stuffed chair on the front balcony when the weather was nice, with earphones on her head, and in her bedroom for the rest of the year, listening to Greek songs.

  Greek music was the one and only thing that made her feel alive. And yet, Xaroula wasn’t born in Greece, she hadn’t lived there, except for three weeks at the age of twenty when her father treated her to a trip over there, and she had come back with a suitcase packed full of music, which she had been listening to every since.

  Her mother was not unhappy to have her stay home and keep her company. Even though her daughter didn’t help out very much, she felt less lonely after her children had left home and her husband had died. Xaroula’s sisters, on the other hand, were stunned to see her vegetate and didn’t know what more they could do to get Xaroula to move her ass. “If you don’t want to work or study, at least go out and find yourself a husband.” Her behaviour, her complete lack of motivation, was totally unlike any of the other family members, who had made their way in life, each in their own way.

  When her mother got sick, two years before she died, Xaroula changed completely. She became a responsible young woman and looked after her very well. Her sisters were very relieved and never talked to her again about finding a husband or a job.

  When their mother died, the family house, the three apartment buildings in Park Extension, and money that their father had saved, was divided up equally among the six children. The three boys gave their share of the inheritance to Xaroula. They had enough money, thank God, and the apartment buildings that their father had picked up for a song only gave them headaches and generated little profit. As for the family house, they said that Xaroula was comfortable where she was and that with the rent from the tenants she would have a decent income.

  This arrangement, agreed upon in less than five minutes, was perfectly fine with the girls.

  Xaroula then found herself alone in a big apartment. Because her mother had occupied an important place in her life for the past two years, she was distraught and cried all day. She couldn’t even listen to her beloved Greek music anymore. She felt old, very old. She didn’t have a mom anymore, or a dad. All of her life felt like a long colourless and monotonous chain leading up to death.

  Her older sister, Adhriani, was also going through hard times. She had sold her shares in the import-export company she had started up with her husband. She had just gotten divorced, and her two children, who were old enough to choose, had decided to go live with their father because they felt like their mother always wanted to control e
verything. Adhriani knew she was no angel, she knew she was authoritarian, but she felt that being stabbed in the back by the children she loved so much was more than she deserved. Her husband kept the house because of the kids, and she found herself in a nowhere-to-go situation, which made her head spin and gave her a funny feeling she had never had, not even when she had gotten off the boat with her parents in this new country at the age of six.

  Eliana, the second child, was no better off than the eldest. She had ditched her boyfriend because he didn’t want kids and because for her it was now or never. Her downtown shop had been limping along for the past few years, and she was fed up with the retail business. She wanted to change course, sell the business, stop, catch her breath and think about the future. Maybe start something with Adhriani, “a shop, an agency, a restaurant, something new, for God’s sake.” Perhaps go back to sculpture again, it had been her passion when she was younger, “why not, better late than never.”

  And so it happened that the members of the girls’ clan were reunited in the family house again, shortly after the death of their mother.

  It’s a beautiful day in May and the three sisters are sitting out on the balcony in comfortable upholstered chairs. One is reading a novel, the other is leafing through a magazine and the third is listening to music. They look calm. Adhriani places her book on her lap and looks out at Hutchison Street, which hasn’t changed a lot since she used to skip rope with Eliana. The sidewalk on the Mile End side has been widened and the trees have grown taller, that’s all. A Hasidic family is walking at a good clip toward Saint-Viateur. On the Outremont side of the street, just in front of her, an old lady is moving slowly,