Brigitte tends to forget the degree of determination with which she has pursued her career. It seemed perfectly natural to want to understand the ins and outs of the company. For several years, she had virtually no social life and did not miss it. She criss-crossed three continents and met a great number of researchers in laboratories across the globe. These meetings were all interesting. And although it was more than she had ever hoped for, and she sometimes felt she was dreaming, she never bragged. She preferred discretion. Only when one steps into her office does Brigitte’s enviable status in the working world become obvious.
The spacious and comfortable office reflects a mind as large as it is open, and yet, the office is anything but intimidating. The severity of the classical woodwork and scholarly bookcases is somewhat attenuated by a number of often-surprising eccentric objects. For example, next to the desk there is the life-size sculpture of a witch carrying a crystal ball in one hand and a Bohemian glass bowl filled with tiny packages of Chiclets chewing-gum in the other. Equally impressive, on a pedestal at the rear of the room: the triple- or quadruple-life-size bronze of a human heart sliced in two. But it is in the broken tennis racket, bent almost in two, lying at the foot of a collection of luxuriously bound books, that Élizabeth, with a half smile, recognizes her friend Brigitte: a cool-headed woman, whose rare but inescapable explosions often have a beneficial effect on those around her, probably because they immediately reestablish, for everyone, the fact that there are limits.
Brigitte has only recently adopted the expression pharmacology of denial to describe the orientation of the research teams under her supervision. In the case of the group searching for a chemical solution to the problem of the rejection of transplanted organs, Brigitte realizes that the term pharmacology of acceptance would be more appropriate than pharmacology of denial. But since she has had to defend some research in the area of transsexualization, she is convinced that denial more than acceptance is what motivates medical research. The object was to create a new hormonal program for sexual transformation. At first, the heads of the multinational were hesitant to undertake such research. They had serious doubts about the profitability of these new drugs. Of course, Brigitte suspected that these gentlemen found the idea of transsexuality rather perverse. She therefore shifted attention onto a derivative area of research emerging from the main hormonal research: a derivative area which held out the promise of a cure for baldness. The gentlemen, who had initially been so reticent, quickly changed their minds and approved all the necessary funds. When Brigitte uses the expression pharmacology of denial, she sees the softened faces of these men, all haunted, up to a point, by the image of a bald head.
***
On this visit, Élizabeth cannot spend much time with her Montréal friend. She’ll be happy just to catch Brigitte in her office before heading back to Moncton. She has nothing in particular to tell her. She would enjoy simply being in her company for a moment, the way one enjoys returning to a familiar place, with all its landmarks and minor changes. Otherwise, she is ready to take up her own life again, with all that is inalterable and fluid about it, and alien too. But this alienation is not a product of her life in Moncton, among Acadians. Rather, it stems from the unexpected way everything happens. Independently of her, independently of her understanding or aspirations. As though life did not come from within, from within her.
Suddenly Élizabeth has arrived at that exact point of existence where the flow of events seems to take precedence over their content, their meaning. She does not really know how to break this thread. Even death no longer seems a sure way out. People die, but life itself continues. Anyway, Élizabeth has no wish to escape from the uninterrupted progress of life. She would simply like to understand its mechanism better, in order to occasionally act on its mystery. In spite of everything, she is often content to remain on the sidelines of life. She’s even developed a kind of talent for stepping back, for distancing herself. This allows her to see the big picture of life, somewhat the way humans admire, centuries later, the contours of some ancient civilization. She thinks of her knack for stepping back as treading water: not churning the water in order to swim, but moving just enough to stay afloat. She realizes this way of life is as much an art as a trial.
But Élizabeth also knows that, by treading water all her life, she might never know whether she is in a pool as opposed to a lake, for example, or in a lake as opposed to a sea, or in a sea as opposed to an ocean, or in an unfathomably large body of water. This impossibility of knowing the ultimate size of things will always be a puzzle to Élizabeth. Which explains, in part, her relatively calm nature. Her feeling of living on the edge of the world also has something to do with it. Because sooner or later, the question of the centre arises; sooner or later the question of the centre poses itself. Her silence is all the more profound at this moment, since she realized for the first time a few moments ago, while pushing the button for the elevator, that what exists is probably not a centre of the world, but only the search for such a centre.
***
In 1953, Nurse Vautour already had the premonition that everyone was free to locate the centre of the world where he or she wished. She herself had, in a sense, selected Italy. For her, nothing could compare with the dramatic flare of the Italians, certainly not those rose-coloured novels, which had become red-coloured novels in Communist Germany (novels in which the protagonist, “his eyes shining like the rivets of his machine, felt his heart beating like the chairman’s gavel in a workers’ meeting”), and even less, the transformation, in China, of the iron curtain into a “bamboo curtain.” As for South America, nothing seemed to be going on there, aside from the column entitled “In Chile with the Oblate Fathers,” which L’Évangéline stubbornly maintained, and which Nurse Vautour simply could not bear to read.
Among the events of 1953 which rekindled Nurse Vautour’s favourable predisposition towards Italy (her mother used to call it the Italies), was the United States’ nomination there of their first woman ambassador, the writer Claire Booth Luce, wife of the editor Henry R. Luce. Reports were that Mrs. Booth Luce had made a favourable impression in a country where “women have failed to make a place for themselves in public life.” And yet, it seemed to Nurse Vautour that Italian women were doing their share to make a place for themselves. A female member of the national assembly had gone so far as to participate in a brawl on the floor of the parliament. L’Évangéline pointed out that she was the first woman to be knocked down onto that floor. On the other hand, the best punch had been thrown at a neo-fascist member, the same man who had stolen the body of Mussolini from the cemetery in Milan, in 1946.
Coincidentally, a few months before the famous brawl, l’Évangéline reported that Mussolini’s remains had finally been “removed from their secret tomb and buried in the family plot in the north of Italy.” The body of Il Duce had been kept in a secret place since the famous bodynapping of 1946, which made the tomb “one of Italy’s best guarded secrets.” Although it seemed clear that Benito Mussolini had rejoined the other members of his family buried in the cemetery at Paderno, near their home village of Predappio, in northern Italy, the government claimed not to know anything about it. This strange silence was augmented by the fact that the story originally filed in Rome was, for the most part, based on rumours. There was confusion also around the exact location of the grave: the article referred both to a family plot out in the open and to a tomb without inscription inside a chapel. Nurse Vautour did not mind these ambiguities so typical of Italian excess and their propensity for exaggeration. She was merely relieved that, having been repatriated to the village of his birth, Mussolini’s body had escaped the torrential rains of the last few days, which were sweeping the country from the Apennines to the southern tip of the boot. As for Italy, such a vertical country, Nurse Vautour could hardly imagine it under water. She nevertheless wondered if the flooding threatened the oratory of the Virgin of Sorrows at Syracuse. She did no
t know that Sicily was separated from the Italian mainland by the Strait of Messina. Nurse Vautour would not have wanted a mere rush of water to annihilate that presumed miracle. She much preferred to imagine the police on alert, calling for reinforcements to control the crowds of pilgrims come to view the terracotta statuette, “one of thousands of such pieces produced by the factories of central Italy.”
As a matter of fact, in this particular case, the Church had wasted no time in initiating the process for recognizing a miracle. Such vigilance did not influence Nurse Vautour’s opinion of the tears which were purported to have flowed from the statuette, but it did serve to set the scene of a miracle, which contained all the elements to maintain the nurse’s interest. The miracle, which consisted in the curing of “desperately ill” people, had begun after the statuette was suspended “above the bed of a Sicilian Communist’s pregnant wife.” The woman reported feeling “drops falling on her forehead one night when she was in bed; looking up, she saw tears running down the hand-painted clay cheeks of the Virgin. The crying continued for four days, from August 29 to September 1. Pilgrims and the sick came in great numbers as the news spread. The figure was placed in a temporary niche under the house of the woman in question and was later moved into a larger niche in the main square of the town.” During the following weeks, “great numbers of sworn testimonies were scrutinized in meetings in Rome and Palermo, the capital of Sicily.” At last, in mid-December, “following a final meeting of the Sicilian bishops . . . the archbishop of Palermo announced the Church had recognized the ‘supernatural’ character of the tears,” chemical tests having demonstrated that “the tears were real.” One interesting point: the Sicilian Communist’s wife gave birth to the child Mariano Natale on the following Christmas day.
i, as in Italy, or the paradoxical sleep.
5
Idle Talk and Composition I
The foundations of a novel — Wave of kidnappings, coffins in tow and fatal fog — A nine-hundred-year-old quarrel — Multiple births and the Melansons’s wager — Shortage of nurses and death of a nurse — Journalists and the Nobel Prize — Eroticism sublimated by invention — French custom regarding team of horses — Norwegian custom regarding the Nobel Peace Prize — Double-action Acadia baking powder — Cardinal Feltin and fence posts — Corpuscular theory of light and other metabolisms — Acadians and Fernandel’s accent — No small regard for literature — Unending risk of the body
IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to ascertain exactly how the months, weeks, days, even hours preceding Baby M.’s birth affected the child’s psychological makeup. To do so would be to identify a kind of primary impulse, whereas life is quite content to move along in a continuity that elicits no more than a yawn. Only a novelist, whose madness we forgive more readily, would venture into this uncharted territory. And madness is almost a prerequisite for anyone taking on what is essentially a peristaltic enterprise of assimilation and transformation, in which one must experience all the various states of matter in the name of something larger, which lives. For novelists do not live; they grind. They take life apart, revelling in the sight of its countless components, and then spend sleepless nights trying to figure out how to breathe life back into this inert matter. And even if they succeed in putting it all together, they continue to fret over whether the machine will be of any use. Which is to say that, yes, novelists do worry about their contribution to humanity. Although they may not be alone in worrying thus, at least they are always the first to do so. Herein lies the novelist’s main privilege, considering his relative powerlessness to change the course of (his)tory. In this regard, intuition and perseverance are more useful than an overly rational approach. For novelists are archaeologists. They may well have an idea of what they are searching for, but they can never predict what they will find. Nothing is guaranteed. All those who wander on this uncertain ground know how slippery the terrain is. This book, for example, which begins with the birth of Baby M. in 1953 and Élizabeth’s presence today in her friend Brigitte’s Montréal office.
The least we can say about Baby M.’s birth is that, from a strictly environmental point of view, the context was far from reassuring. Two days before the amniotic sac broke, l’Évangéline reported a wave of child kidnappings in the United States, a wave that, it was feared, would soon spread to Canada. The following day, the paper offered a story on the sad fate of other children who, during the past year, had died after accidentally locking themselves inside abandoned refrigerators. These tragic deaths had triggered a refrigerator conservation movement of sorts, launched in the hope of inciting people not to discard what were potentially children’s coffins. Adding to this rather gloomy atmosphere, a greyish-yellow mist had descended on all of England the very day of Baby M.’s birth. The fog threatened to become deadly in the capital since, although many Londoners had bought protective masks, few were willing to wear them in public. It also turns out that the same day, the Russians opened Stalin’s tomb for the first time since his death. The thousands of so-honoured civil servants and workers filing past the preserved remains recognized “the Stalin of yesteryear, though he looked much younger than a man of seventy-three years.” In spite of “the hot and stagnant air” in the crypt, the rejuvenating breeze blew clear across to Europe. The day after Baby M.’s birth, l’Évangéline announced that England and France had put an end to their nine-hundred-year-old quarrel over the Minquiers Islands, two tiny islands in the English Channel, rich in lobsters and oysters.
***
Three other babies, three boys — a Cormier, a LeBlanc, and a Thibodeau — were born the same day as Baby M. in Moncton’s Hôtel-Dieu l’Assomption. Four babies — three girls and a boy — had also come into the world in Moncton hospitals the day of the coronation: two in Moncton City Hospital and two in Hôtel-Dieu. These last four babies received silver spoons commemorating Elizabeth II’s ascension to the throne. The eight newborns were among 417,884 births registered in Canada in 1953, to the delight of the baby-food industry, whose continued prosperity was assured. Other Acadian births also attracted attention in 1953. A couple named Melanson, originally from Bathurst but living in Santa Monica, California, won an unusual wager with the renowned insurance company Lloyd’s of London. According to L’Évangéline, shortly after learning that his wife was pregnant, Gregoire Melanson bet Lloyd’s that his wife would give birth to more than one child. The insurance policy against multiple births cost Mr. Melanson two hundred dollars, but required Lloyd’s to pay five thousand dollars per child born after the first. As l’Évangéline’s caption beneath the photo of the triplets in the arms of Californian nurse Mary Leopardi put it, the two girls and one boy were worth their weight in gold.
In Canada, this crop of infants, each one as loveable as the next, did nothing to relieve the pressure on hospitals, which were facing a shortage in nurses. According to the president of the Canadian Medical Association, Dr. Charles Burns, the fault lay with doctors, airlines, and military hospitals: doctors because they hired nurses to do office work, airlines because they recruited nurses to work as hostesses, and military hospitals because they did not pay their share of the cost of training nurses. The Hôtel-Dieu l’Assomption was not exempt from this problem. In August 1953, the hospital put out a call to nursing graduates and auxiliaries who had taken extended leave to do their part for “suffering humanity.” It was understood that those who responded to the call would be justly rewarded, because it was not money that was in short supply, but rather qualified nurses. In this context, the death of a nurse did not go unnoticed. And all the more so when the nurse in question was a pillar like Florence Breau, long-time director of nurses in Moncton City Hospital. The staff of the hospital had only just moved into a new building to which, sad to say, Nurse Breau was the first patient admitted. Announcing the demise of Miss Breau, hospital administrator Dr. Porter declared that “no successor, regardless of her abilities or goodness, would ever erase the memory of Miss Breau, for those who had
had the privilege to work with her or under her orders.” Florence Breau had studied in Moncton’s Aberdeen High School and in the Villa Maria convent in Montréal. She had completed her training in the nursing school of the very same hospital that had so appreciated her services.
***
Journalists are not infallible. While Lester B. Pearson was critical of their talent for anticipation, others deplored their lack of accuracy. Such journalistic weaknesses also existed at l’Évangéline, of course. For example, it may be that the Melanson triplets actually earned their parents five thousand rather than ten thousand dollars. Two articles contradicted each other on this question. All the same, such journalistic errors occasionally resulted in happy events in the world. The creation of the Nobel Prizes for example. When Ludwig Nobel, brother of the famous Swedish industrialist and chemist Alfred Nobel, died in Cannes, in 1888, a Parisian newspaper, believing it was Alfred Nobel who had expired, published the headline “Merchant of Death Dies.” Although he had made his fortune in explosives and weapons (he perfected dynamite, and a plastic dynamite safer to handle than pure nitroglycerine), Alfred Nobel, who was above all an inventor, was no doubt shaken by the headline, which betrayed the manner in which he would be remembered. Because he had done far more than perfect explosives. Wilhelm Odelberg, historian and Swedish scientist, tells us that Nobel owned no less than 355 patents on inventions in various countries, notably for artificial silk and leather, and for gutta-percha, an electrical insulator. He also maintained a lengthy correspondence with the Austrian novelist Bertha von Suttner, an ardent pacifist. As a result, one year before his death, Alfred Nobel wrote the famous will which so stunned his relations, colleagues, and the Swedish public in general. In leaving his entire fortune to those whose genius would best serve humanity, Alfred Nobel authored his last invention.
1953 Page 7