Hutchison Street
Page 18
After going to the dorms for international students and dropping off her bags at the Deutsch de la Meurthe building, which took in “transients” for the summer, she went straight to Montparnasse. Excited, nervous and already awestruck, she went to La Coupole, the mythic brasserie of the books she had read, where tables were reserved for the most prominent writers and painters from Paris and elsewhere. That evening, she did not seen Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, but she did meet a painter called Stefano Cataldi, accompanied by his wife Clara, who was breathtakingly beautiful. The painter looked at her several times, then came over and asked her if she’d like to join them. She hesitated for just a moment, but then got up to sit with them. After all, she had come to Paris and to La Coupole, in particular, to meet artists, and if those two were not actually artists, they at least looked nice.
She would later call it “the first evening of my new life.” It was a magnificent evening full of laughter and discovery. Right from the start, as soon as her shyness melted away, she had the feeling that she had known them forever, and she had the (well-founded) premonition that this would turn out to be a significant encounter.
A few days later, she launched into a new and fascinating experience for her – being a model. She posed for four mornings a week over a period of six months. It wasn’t easy, but she learned a lot. About art, and about life.
Because while the painter is looking at his model, the model is also looking at the painter.
She witnessed the artist’s concentration. He worked for four hours without flagging, at a steady rhythm, even picking up the pace sometimes. The artist’s breathing was in sync with his movements. His eyes were completely transformed. He would observe her intensely, penetrating her inner self. As if he were soaking her up with his gaze and swallowing her up as he breathed.
When he stopped painting, around one o’clock in the afternoon, he was exhausted. As drained as a worker who had just finished his shift on a construction site. “I sometimes go to work in construction,” he told her one day with a laugh. “It gives me a break from painting, and it works.”
She was also tired, but completely spellbound. Being immobile was taxing, but she felt both weary and mesmerized as she observed the intensity with which the artist sucked up the energy he needed from his subject. Even though she was motionless, she had the feeling she was working as hard as he was.
After their working sessions, Cataldi would often invite his model to La Coupole, naturally, where he had his own table. Françoise would regain her strength and the painter would once again have a mischievous smile on his face and lapse back into his seductive chatter with a hint of an Italian accent. How many fascinating conversations they had about art and life, which were linked to one another like yin and yang, the sun and the moon, light and darkness.
Young Françoise soaked it all up.
Clara, the beautiful and generous Clara, took Françoise under her wing, showed her around Paris, introduced her to the cuisines of many countries and, best of all, encouraged her to talk. Françoise was the kind of person that people referred to as a party girl – she liked to laugh, have a good time and drink. But, deep down, she didn’t open up easily, her anxiety made her clam up as indescribable emotions bubbled up inside her. Clara’s intelligent and gentle nature turned out to be beneficial because she helped Françoise to understand why she was floundering and to become more conscious of her fears and desires. While Françoise was walking around Île Saint-Louis with Clara, after she had been living in Paris for around six months, it dawned on her that one day she would have to deal with her fears if she wanted to fulfil her dreams. It was inevitable. She couldn’t get around it without giving it a try. She had to try, at least. Her entire body quivered with terror, and she knew at that very moment that if she ever managed to control her anxieties, she would get her life back. Her real life. The one she wanted to live.
Through Cataldi and Clara she met many painters, writers and musicians. There were elaborate dinners cooked by Clara, who was a talented chef. That year, she had handed over responsibility for a restaurant she was running to her assistant, which gave her the time she needed to come up with new recipes. During one of her famous and unforgettable meals, Françoise heard a painter say to a writer, “When an artist paints a portrait, he is always painting himself.” While the writer was mulling this over, Cataldi jumped into the conversation and agreed. Absolutely no doubt, he opined. Françoise didn’t
understand. She could see herself in Cataldi’s portraits, and even when he had painted only one part of her body, it was her, good God, and no one else.
She was young then, and had not yet started to write.
It was not until she wrote this book – until it was practically all finished – that she fully grasped what she had heard at the age of twenty-four. If Cataldi had chosen her, it was probably because he saw in her a part of himself that he had not yet explored. You are only conscious of something that is already part of your subconscious, perhaps unknowingly. Consciousness – from con (“together”) and scire (“to know”) – is a joint process.
And that’s what Françoise had being doing right from the beginning.
All of the characters she portrayed were part of herself. Threads of the lives of others or threads of her own life – it didn’t matter – which she wove together to form the fabric of life itself.
As her printer spews out the pages of her book, she is as excited as she was the very first time. She feels the urge to pick up the phone and call Jean-Hugues, to say, “come over and bring a bottle of champagne, my novel is finished!” Except that her lover is sulking at the moment. It’s not hard to figure out why. She didn’t want to talk about what she was writing and, mainly, she didn’t let him read the manuscript before anyone else. Not even one paragraph. This is the first time this has happened since they got together.
The main reason is that this novel is very different from her previous ones. That’s what she wanted. Even though she trusts him utterly, she was afraid he would interfere, that he would exert his influence one way or the other. She is more vulnerable than she looks. Secondly, Jean-Hugues is in the novel. She hasn’t told him yet. She has changed his name, of course, but everyone will recognize her publisher, who is a public figure.
She doesn’t want any reactions. If she had allowed him to read the book, she would have had to do the same for the twenty other people who inspired her. It was out of the question, and even impossible, in certain cases. She wanted to be fair to everyone, even though she was motivated by trepidation more than anything else. “C’est ça qui est ça,” as Martin Léon says in his song. That’s just the way it is. When the pages are bound together, into an actual paperback book, she will feel strong, that’s what she’s hoping. No one will be able to change anything after that. And if Jean-Hugues refuses to publish it, she will go elsewhere.
As she hugs her stack of pages and the characters they evoke, she is singing out loud, belting out lines of a
Vigneault song about ships making love and waging war amid the crashing waves.8 She pours herself a glass of wine, fills a dish with salted almonds, and goes out onto her balcony. It is the middle of May. Except for a two-week break to tour universities in Mexico, a week in New York at the invitation of the PEN and a few appearances at Montreal libraries, she has spent the past year,
to the day, writing about her street, spurred on by Hinda Rochel, who came to her in her dreams night after night.
Madeleine Desrochers is walking along, holding onto Nzimbou’s arm, Benoît Fortin sprints past them, Chawki and Isabelle are going home, teasing one another and laughing, a few young Hasidim race past as if they were going to put out a fire somewhere, and Hinda Rochel is coming home from school.
Just before stepping into her house, Hinda Rochel turns around and spots Françoise, who waves to her and smiles.
After brushing the mezuzah with her hand, and before
slipping inside, Hinda Rochel looks up at Françoise once more, with a smile on her face.
It is a timid smile, but it is beautiful.
Endnotes
1 Gabrielle Roy (1909–1983) was one of French Canada’s most prominent authors. Her first novel, Bonheur d’occasion, was published in 1945 and was translated into English as The Tin Flute, first by Hannah Josephson in 1947, then by Alan Brown in 1980.
2 Pendant que, written by legendary Quebec singer/songwriter Gilles Vigneault.
3 In this song, the French singer Renaud reminisces about his past, one of the features of which is a candy called “mistral gagnant”; some of the packages were marked “gagnant,” meaning that another package could be obtained free.
4 Toujours vivant was composed by Michel Rivard, with lyrics by Gerry Boulet.
5 Fool around; mess up; bother; flip flops; wuss; hooker.
6 Snow banks; slush; black ice; blowing snow.
7 Gabrielle Roy’s autobiographical novel Ces enfants de ma vie (1977) was translated by Alan Brown as Children of My Heart (McClelland and Stewart, 1979). This quote is taken from Brown’s translation. The original French reads as follows: “En repassant, comme il m’arrive souvent, ces temps-ci, par mes années de jeune institutrice, dans une école de garçons, en ville, je revis, toujours aussi chargé d’émotion, le matin de la rentrée. J’avais la classe des tout-petits.”
8 This is another reference to Pendant que, by Gilles Vigneault.