by Abla Farhoud
Françoise had often seen her in the neighbourhood shops, or standing at her window, her hand resting against the windowpane, or sitting on her balcony with a small straw hat on her head. Now that she was writing about Marie Lajoie, she recalled bits of conversation they had had together in the grocery store, at the drugstore, or even on the street.
About a year ago, Marie Lajoie and Françoise had seen a piano and its owner moving in, just across from Marie’s apartment and a few houses down from Françoise’s place. The two women could hear the music when they were at the front of their apartment, and even more distinctly in summer than in winter.
While sitting out on her balcony last evening, Françoise saw Marie Lajoie quite by chance, walking toward the pianist on the sidewalk. The old lady stopped for a moment, smiled at the young woman and went on her way. The musician smiled back and kept on walking. A few seconds later, the two women turned and faced one another, both at the same time. They were still smiling.
A beautiful encounter was about to take place on Hutchison Street. Françoise sat down to work and didn’t leave her computer once, except to go sweat intensely for a half-hour on the cardio machines at the Y. Exercising helped her to forget about her writing for a few minutes, although by the time she left the Y she was back in the clutches of her character, of course.
This morning, she woke up with Marie Lajoie and the musician lady in her head. She didn’t take the time to write her dream down on paper, as she usually did, because she was in so much of a hurry to get down to work.
Her enthusiasm did not dwindle for the rest of the day.
Marie Lajoie
Marie Lajoie was eighty-nine years old. She thought that she still had a few good years left. The life of human beings is not eternal, she knew that, but she would have liked to be an exception. She wanted to live the longest and best life possible, and then choose the day and hour when she would die. That had been her wish since she was fifty-six.
Before the age of fifty-six, she had not been fully conscious of this thing called life, and, what’s more, she had had a deep-seated fear of death. Her fear of death had had a direct impact on her life. Her subconscious played tricks on her so that her fear of death – which is so final and definitive – became entangled with all the other fears that arise in life: the fear of taking risks, asserting oneself, taking chances, losing, changing, taking action, suffering. In a word, the fear of living replaced her fear of dying and was all-consuming.
When she was fifty-six, she came to terms with death and was no longer afraid of it. She was not afraid of life or death. She understood that there was a fine line separating life from death. And that one could become the other at any moment. It came to her in a dream. Another kind of person would have tried to forget about it as quickly as possible. But for Marie Lajoie it was a revelation.
In her dream, she saw herself alive, then she saw herself dead. When she woke up, she wrote an account of her dream in her journal and drew two bodies lying side by side, with a small space between them. The one on the left was alive and the one on the right was dead. But what she saw, in reality, was movement, the live body moving toward the right, and then it was over. It was dead. The live body changed its status in a fraction of a second. No pain, no fear, just a shifting over. In less than a second, memories accumulated over years of life were erased. There was no longer any memory in the dead body. The soul, the spirit, the memory, which had filled the body and kept it alive, were extinguished forever.
From that day on, she was never afraid of death anymore. But she wanted to choose the time to die. The moment at which the shift would take place, without any pain whatsoever.
From that day on, she loved life with all her strength. Since that day the only goddess she worshipped was Life, life in all its forms. And the most striking characteristic of life was that nothing remains the same as it was, that everything changes and dies.
Only the living die.
Only the living wither.
Only the living change.
That day, she understood that she preferred being alive because the living are constantly changing, because the living are breathtaking, because the living are delicate and beautiful and in constant flux. Death stops everything. When something is dead it doesn’t change anymore. A dead body becomes dust and, according to the scriptures, the soul awaits the last judgement or goes to heaven, purgatory, or hell, or is reincarnated, depending on what you believe in. She doesn’t have any beliefs, even though she respects those who do. When you look into the abyss, you hold on to whatever you think can help.
To live in our living body with all the associated happiness and unhappiness is all that we are able to experience. Only one single time.
As Marie saw it, a dead body can no longer go up or down the stairs, it can no longer wink or smile. A dead body can no longer dance, learn a new language or be captivated by the music of Mozart, Ferré or Parker. If you are dead, you can no longer see the rays of the sun spread across your table or feel them tickle your face. A dead body can’t play piano. But Marie could still do all that and feel the joy of every minute. She felt her joy grow deeper day by day, as time ran out and she had less and less time left to spend in the world of the living.
It was as if she had to settle the thorny issue of death before she could live life to the fullest. In order to move on to the most important phase in life – her last – she needed to conquer the fear that had been ruining her life.
Marie Lajoie didn’t have any family left. She had survived her husband, as well as her brothers and her sisters who had all died at around a hundred or nearly – she was the youngest of them. Her only child had died at the age of four from an illness that was unknown at the time and she hadn’t had other kids.
After her husband died, along with her friends, who passed away one after the other, she was lonely for a time. The only person she saw was a young neighbour she had hired to do the chores she was unable to do by herself. He lived three doors away and had become a dear friend. Julien Francoeur would be part of her life until she died, he would hold her hand the very second her heart stopped beating, when her memory would vanish forever.
Death would come when she called it – she had everything she needed on her night table – when she no longer felt like living anymore.
She had started to attend writing workshops, and she took classes in Spanish, a language that she loved and spoke fluently now. In this way, her social life had picked up again, little by little. She now had friends, and even a lover who courted her resolutely. All of them were younger than she was.
She lived alone and was rather proud of it. Like the people of the Bible, chosen by God, she felt that she, too, had been “chosen” to live Life in order to show the world that it was possible to be joyful at any age. And to think that she had had the auspicious name “Lajoie” for only sixty-five years!
Marie Latour – that was her maiden name – had been living on Hutchison Street since 1943, the year she married Charles-Henri Lajoie, an engineer. They were both working in a large architecture firm in downtown Montreal. In those days, correspondence was done almost only in English and Marie Latour was a bilingual secretary. She was so fluent in English that the first time Charles-Henri spoke to her he did so in English. “Why are you speaking English to me?” she asked, flashing her prettiest smile at him. “My name is Marie Latour and I am a French-Canadian like you.” When Marie recalled the delightful moment when Charles-Henri answered her, switching to French right away, blushing and apologizing, she smiled as if he were still standing there right in front of her.
“Who will keep the image of Charles-Henri alive when I’m no longer here? Who will think about him?”
When she thought about him, about his love and his love of life, a melancholic tenderness swept through her body. When she was younger, she was besieged with melancholy, it happened often and lasted for a very long time.
It was very difficult to pull herself out from under this cloud, which she dreaded and liked at the same time. But as she aged, everything happened more quickly, both the very good and the bad.
“Who will think about him? Who will think about me?”
As she evoked these tender feelings, she would try to make them last just a little longer by sitting down at the piano. For some time now, she had played without sheet music, letting her fingers, her memory, her creativity go wherever they wanted to. She would improvise until nothing else tickled her fancy. Then, she would pick up her journal and try to write down what she had never before put down in writing. It’s hard work to be original, and she had the impression that it was easier to be innovative on the piano.
She had kept a diary since the age of fifteen. She had cardboard boxes filled with her notebooks, and these boxes piled up at the rate of two or three a year. Over seventy-four years, that added up to a lot of notebooks and a lot of words. A few years ago, it occurred to her that she should read her diaries again from the beginning. She spent weeks reading, reliving her life in fast forward. She had been a bit disappointed. Except for the parts where love and later death made each word resonate. From year to year, from notebook to notebook, there were few new ideas, or new emotions. She had rehashed a lot of things that had once seemed so important, but they were not, or rather they were no longer, important.
She was moved by young Marie as she discovered love. She was touched by a young woman in her first years of marriage grappling with the small and large problems of conjugal life, which took up so much space. She was overwhelmed by the death of her child, which was as heart-breaking as if it had just occurred, and also by the immeasurable sorrow of a woman losing her husband at the age of seventy-five.
The most striking change of tone came when she had stopped fearing death, after her dream, at the age of fifty-six. It was as if a new life was beginning. A new person appeared, who looked like Marie, the child who was curious about everything, and who persevered even when she was afraid.
On her eightieth birthday, there was another surprise, at the beginning of a new notebook: “What is the use of being the actor and the only spectator in one’s own life? What can I leave behind after all the years I have spent on this earth? All of my experience will die with me. My happiness and my joy will die with me. What do I have to do to leave something behind? There’s a lot of pride in my desire, so many people have died without … ” She had never expressed a desire of this magnitude in any of the previous notebooks.
Then, she forgot about it, and once again began to live her life from day to day. And time passed, as if that was the only thing it could do.
Every day after breakfast, she would meditate for twenty minutes, play the piano for as long as she felt like playing, and then do a half an hour of exercise, or PE as they used to say when she was young. Then she would stand in front of the door that led to her balcony, which faced Hutchison Street. If it wasn’t cold out, she would go out for a stroll or she would go out on her balcony with her cup of coffee or herbal tea. It was a beautiful day this time. From her balcony she could see a piano tied up in cables being hoisted up on the other side of the street.
A beautiful tall woman, who was excited and also somewhat amused, was watching them handle the piano, which was meant to land on a third-floor balcony. As soon as the piano was put down and rolled inside the house, the young woman zoomed up the stairs. You could hear a few notes, after which the young woman went out onto the balcony with her hand over her heart. With exaggerated gestures to express her thanks, she waved to the men who were still standing on the sidewalk below. She looked happy. Marie Lajoie already liked the new arrival in the neighbourhood.
Marie heard her play on the days that followed. It wasn’t classical music, or well-known tunes either, so these were surely compositions by the young woman herself. Sometimes she accompanied herself while singing in a low voice, somewhat husky, full of warmth and tenderness. The old woman stayed glued to her spot on the balcony and listened.
Marie Lajoie began to daydream while listening to her, and felt even more acutely her desire to leave something of herself to humanity. She had just discovered what she wanted to do: write songs.
She imagined her own words sung in the voice of this young woman. The end of a life sung with the voice of youth, a beautiful contrast and a superb way to tie together the two extremes of life.
She set about working. But how would she get started? The lyrics? The music? She scratched out a few words, picked out a melody on the piano, then came back to the words. But it wasn’t working. She had studied piano for about a dozen years, but had never studied composition. She had filled thousands of pages of her notebooks, but had never written poems, even though she loved to read poetry. And she had never written songs, even though she had listened to songs forever and knew dozens of them by heart. It was very challenging to become an author and composer at her age. But she wanted to take up the challenge. She wanted to leave at least one song that would withstand the test of time. At least one.
She quickly realized that writing a song had nothing to do with writing in a diary. The young woman across the street would know how to fix that, she would correct her errors. She set her journal aside and took out some blank paper just like they did in her writing workshop. She wrote for one or two hours a day. She filled the pages with scribbling, tinkering with things she wrote, but she wasn’t really satisfied with anything. Not until an expression came to her: In my forgetful mind. She stopped and repeated the phrase. In my forgetful mind … She liked that phrase. She began to hum it. She wiggled her fingers over the piano, repeating the words and letting her hands move across the keyboard … In my forgetful mind … Until the following phrase appeared … Dreams of childhood rewind …
She went to get the old typewriter that had sat idle for several years and she began to type, without making any mistakes and in one go, as if someone were dictating the words to her.
In my forgetful mind
Dreams of childhood rewind
Every instant is a commencement
In my contented mind
Each day is intertwined
With love and death drawing near
On the brink of my ninetieth year
What can I leave behind?
My love for all mankind
My friendship a legacy
For a world of agony
Time passes steadily
With only one life to live, we
Are grains of sand on the edge of the sea
Where suffering torments us endlessly
Happiness thankfully
Gives us a way to defy
The fateful end awaiting us
Remember, remember
Even pain passes eventually
We choose to bring happiness closer
Remember, remember
Time flies, but it flies too fast
Happiness is ours, we must make it last
It’s the only way to shrug off
The fateful end awaiting us
Remember, remember
Time passes steadily
Even pain passes eventually
Happiness is a challenge a choice and an anchor
It’s the only way to defy
The fateful death awaiting us
When she finished writing, she read it over and cried with joy, with pain. She didn’t know why she was crying. She had just written her first complete song. She didn’t know whether it was good or bad, but it didn’t matter. What she had just written was important to her. The proof was the shiver that was running down her spine.
One year has gone by since she wrote her first song. She is soon going to celebrate her ninetieth birthday and she has just spent an extraordinary year writing songs with passion, sometimes with joy, pain, discouragement, euphoria. She has experienced all those emotions. She has finished twelve songs with a thirteenth on
the way. She has decided to compose the melodies only when they come easily to her, and to concentrate on writing lyrics.
It is a beautiful day in May. Hutchison Street is sunny, the children are happy to finally be able to play in light clothing without clunky boots slowing them down. Marie Lajoie has chosen her day well. “At my age,” she says to herself, “I have earned the right to refuse to be passive, to live the way I want and to die when I want. I also have the right to ask the young musician if she would like to sing my songs, knowing full well that she could easily tell me to take a hike.”
Marie Lajoie walks up the stairs slowly, her shoulder bag stuffed with her papers, her cane hooked over her left arm and her right hand clinging to the railing. She stops at the door to the third floor apartment, listens with delight to the singer’s voice and, as soon as it is quiet inside, rings the bell. The door opens. The young woman is surprised at first. Whenever she has run into the old lady, she has been moved by her indescribable gaze, she has been so struck by how gracious she looks that she has even turned around to watch her walk by. Like a goddess from another time. Marie Lajoie introduces herself and says that she would like to talk to her. Both shocked and touched by the presence of the old woman, the musician gives her a welcoming smile. She invites her in and gives her her arm so that she can lean on it.
Françoise Camirand
Ever since she started writing about some of the people on her street, who went on to become her characters, she has started to think about the brief time in her youth when she was a model.
When she was twenty-four, she decided to travel. Paris was going to be her first big stop. She had read so many novels set in Paris that she was dying to see Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Boul’ Mich, Montparnasse, place de Fürstenberg, and all the other streets and neighbourhoods she knew the names of. So Françoise ended up in Paris, after slaving away in a trendy restaurant for an entire year. The only advantage of working as a waitress in a chichi restaurant was that even the most aggravating customers left big tips. She worked double time, saved all her money, didn’t go out after work, stopped drinking and gave up the lines of coke that cost a fortune. She was a crashing bore as far as her friends were concerned, but she didn’t give a damn. She had only one goal, which was to get away.