Arvida

  I couldn’t believe it. I was really happy. Just in case, in the afternoon, I showed my son-in-law how to put the solar blanket on the swimming pool, how to work the heat pump and the retractable awning on the terrace, and the outside sound system if they wanted to put some music on. I showed him my wine cellar and my meat freezer in the basement, saying “Don’t be shy, eh, it’s our pleasure.”

  Then I added:

  “In any case, if you can convince my daughter to sleep here for a week, I’ll tip my hat to you. Even now, she’s still thinks there are supernatural things going on in the house.”

  He looked at me, my son-in-law, then he said with an odd little smile, a bit mysterious:

  “Oh, I think that you too, you saw some strange things back then.”

  He brought me up short, I confess. I didn’t stick my neck out, or anything. I just said, to shut him up:

  “Yes, it’s true. I’ve seen things. But they had nothing to do with the house.”

  I almost added something else, but I decided to leave things there. We looked at each other in silence, and we understood each other. And I gave him the last word, even if that’s not like me.

  “Don’t worry, everything’s cool now. Julie’s a lot calmer. And anyway, with houses like yours, you get what you put in.”

  I like him fine, that boy. I think my daughter’s good with him, and their children are well brought up. I think he’s got his head screwed on right, and that what he said is probably the smartest thing you can say about my house, and lots of other things.

  You get back what you put in.

  Madeleines

  ARVIDA III

  Once, only once, my grandmother, mother of my father, said:

  “There are no thieves in Arvida, Georges. It has to be somewhere.”

  I was nine or ten years old, and I didn’t know what they were talking about. Next to the TV room, in the basement, there was a storage room with an old jumble of things and an oil furnace that leaked, a work bench, and a toilet my brother and I were scared stiff of using for our needs. Doubtless to take pre-emptive action against any impending adolescent onanism, my grandmother said that if you sat there for too long, the odour of young flesh and excrement could lure a voracious rat into the pipe.

  Georges had been rooting around in there for two days when he finally cried out, “Eureka!” He and my grandmother called me alone into the middle of the clutter. On a table as small as a sewing machine stand, Georges had placed a different kind of machine: black, with a keyboard in front, a white page slipped in over a roller and up through a kind of target in the middle of the sheet, held in place by a metal rod mounted on a mechanism set between the two extremities of a red and black ribbon. Above the keyboard, below the machine’s big opening where the type bars were all lined up like organ pipes, was inscribed in big letters:

  UNDERWOOD

  My grandfather had bought the typewriter just after the war, at a time when, with the European economy only slowly getting back on its feet, Quebec had become Underwood’s best market for, at a discount, unloading its backlog of machines with French keyboards.

  To make ends meet, my grandfather and grandmother had used it to write articles for Progrès-Dimanche and later for La Source. On this machine, all my aunts and uncles had worn out their fingernails and joints in the course of their studies. On this machine my grandfather had written, all his life long, scouting reports for the Chicago Blackhawks, the New York Rangers, and at the Junior level, the Quebec Remparts. What is more, on this machine he’d said for the first time that Michel Goulet, a young left-winger from Péribonka, would be a gold mine for any club that got its hands on him.

  Georges had oiled and greased it, and it was like new.

  This was in 1988 or 1989, however, and I didn’t quite know what they wanted me to do with their antique. My grandmother explained:

  “It’s for your stories.”

  “What stories?”

  “The ones you’re telling all the time. And the ones you make up.”

  It’s true that at that age I was a bit of a liar. In fact, since I was very young, I’d tended to exasperate my brother and his friends by forcing on our little toys (G.I. Joe, He-Man, and the Playmobil characters) lengthy melodramas, before letting them throw a single punch.

  “Those stories, exactly. You could write them on this, and they wouldn’t bother anybody. Besides, you’d practise your French. And maybe one day they’d be good enough for you to read them to your mother, your father, or me.”

  I thought that was a good idea. So I quickly familiarized myself with the keys and the mechanics and the gummy letters that sometimes got stuck to the page. I began to recount any old thing on it, especially stories stolen from Will Eisner (whose Spirit we had in translation in my uncles’ old Pilote magazines which my grandmother had saved), and from Stephen King, the world’s coolest writer at the time. I wrote awful stories set in an Arvida that wasn’t entirely fictional, where the sheriff was called Jim, his wife Deborah, and their son Timothy.

  (It’s also then that I became an insomniac for good. The child starts to write by resisting sleep. In his room, between the sheets, he wards off what will soon escape him forever, when his whole life he’ll be chasing after sleep and feeling it slip through his fingers. But that’s where it begins: a child in his bed, in flight from it. Not to sleep, not to dream, never to close his eyes. Darting them everywhere in the darkness, remembering the day, imprinting in his mind everything about it that was ugly and everything that was beautiful.)

  Later, I wanted to write my own stuff.

  In a little notebook, I jotted things down that I afterwards transcribed onto the machine. I looked into things that had really happened in Arvida, and I tried to put together a kind of working-class mythology. Strange happenings were few and far between, because the town was young and its occult underside pretty tenuous. I listened for stories told by older brothers and sisters that were not silly tales off a Ouija Board or yarns about a demented baby-sitter who roasted babies in an oven like turkey.

  I didn’t find much.

  My mother said that my godmother had once lived in a house in Saint-Mathias where there had been a suicide, and left after a few months, refusing ever to talk about it.

  In a house on Rue Faraday, on the second floor, behind a high narrow window giving onto the church, you could see at sundown, in the summer, and when the night sky turned opaque in winter, a woman gazing out distractedly, humming a lullaby to her child. In the bed, the baby was dead. It was a ghost, of course, but the ghost of a dead baby. It wasn’t its own ghost, it was part of what was left behind by its dead mother. The baby cried no more, breathed no more, neither in this world nor the next. It was the ghost of something else, something deathly pale, black around the eyes and black at the lips, which the mother was trying to put to sleep. I didn’t know if the baby changed. Someone had told me that the baby in the bed was dead. I promised not to say who. Me, on the sidewalk, I just saw the mother bent over the cradle. I’m not even sure she was dead.

  On Rue Oersted, a former tenant talked to me about something strange. There were no ghosts at that address. It was just that in a big empty house, you heard, two or three times a year, an echo of ancient conversations. The tenant, alone, intrigued, got up in the middle of the night to check out all the rooms, one by one, in the dark. He had to conclude that those voices came from nowhere.

  In the woods stretching from the water purification factory road to the golf course, there lived a monster. When we took that road to get a Pepsi and chips paid for by friends of my father who drank at the clubhouse there, we often heard it, enormous, moving among the branches. We fled, screaming, until we were out of breath and the thick greenery opened out onto the golf course parking lot. I always thought it was a Tyrannosaurus. My brother said it was a werewolf. Stéphane Blais said it was a bear, Jean-Nicolas Frigon a fly
ing shark, and my Bergeron cousins a dragon. Much later, after I’d forgotten the absolute terror and the imagined silhouette that rustled in the leaves, a friend told me that there really was a monster living on the golf course, she’d seen it, and it had told her things.

  It was a man.

  I tried to write a whole story, once, about our house at the end of Rue Gay-Lussac. It was a huge white wooden house with black shutters, an annex, a double garage, and an inground swimming pool, the dream house my parents had bought when they were rich.

  My story was that of a man who as an adult bought back a house he’d lived in as a child. He moved into it with his wife and child, and realized that the house was haunted by himself. The man had been clinically dead at the age of twelve, drowned in the pool. I never managed to finish it, because I didn’t know if it was a sad story or a horror story. We’d had to vacate the house in 1987. At the end my parents each slept in their own room at either end of the hall, and the damaged swimming pool had become a real swamp. Frogs swam in its stagnant water, and every week we found dead animals there.

  She’d had a good idea, sitting me down in front of the Underwood, my grandmother, mother of my father. Unfortunately for her, and above all for me, there are always times when I get attached to stories that aren’t stories really, that begin without ending and never get anywhere. Possibilities, dreams, and missed rendezvous. Phantoms and absences.

  My favourite story happened to a friend of my brother, whom I’ll just call D.

  D. lived alone with his brother and his mother. He talked about how, when he was seven years old, he’d been told his father had died from cancer. This was false, we knew, as D. himself learned later on.

  His father had killed himself, jumping from the Shipshaw Bridge.

  An engineering jewel financed by Arthur Vining Davis, completed in 1950, opened by Maurice Duplessis, and still today the only aluminum bridge in the world, the Shipshaw Bridge, built in an arc, rises over an arm of the Saguenay River almost forty metres above a dizzying gorge, a rough current, and sharp rocks. I forget how many people actually killed themselves there, but in my father’s unfettered imagination, they’re legion.

  That’s also his way of telling me that his morale is low. Sometimes I call, I ask him how he is, and he replies:

  “They’re serving number 6 on the Shipshaw Bridge. I’m 72.”

  Many or not, D.’s father was one of them. After D.’s mother had left Arvida for a neighbouring town, she preferred the expurgated story of a cancer to that of suicide.

  At the age of sixteen, D. began to go out with a young woman whose family had just resettled in the area, after the father, who worked for Hydro Quebec, had been for two decades posted in various parts of the province. Through his girlfriend, D. learned that his new father-in-law had once been a close friend of his own father.

  There came the day when she introduced him to her parents. The usual conversation, silences, unease and forced laughter, until D. finished the beer he’d been offered, and began to feel more at ease. The father was left alone with him, and inquired about his mother, his brother, and himself. After a while, feeling more at ease himself, he asked:

  “Do you have news from your father from time to time?”

  D. replied, troubled:

  “Sir, my father has been dead for ten years.”

  The father-in-law choked on his beer, and apologized for his unpardonable lapse. They went to the table, but D. had clearly seen how the father had gone pale in pronouncing those words, and how he’d avoided his gaze afterwards. He didn’t do anything in front of his girlfriend, and waited for the next day to go and pursue the subject at the man’s workplace.

  “Sir, yesterday you asked me if I’d had news of my father, and you nearly passed out when I told you he was dead. I’d like to know why. I’d like you to tell me the truth, and not try to make me believe that it was nothing, because I saw in your face that it isn’t nothing.

  His father-in-law sighed.

  “As you wish, my boy. I didn’t know your father was dead, because I was far from here at that time. I thought your parents were divorced. But I think you should make your own inquiries, because I ran into your father in the street in Rouyn last year.”

  Even if I still, today, have a lot of sympathy for D., I’m even more enamoured of the abyss opened up by that reply.

  Was it possible that D.’s father wasn’t dead?

  Had they actually found his body under the Shipshaw Bridge?

  I left for Montreal before my brother could tell me the rest, if there was any more to tell. I often, from afar, thought about this mystery, like a fat detective in the pages of a yellowed crime novel.

  The most plausible solution I found was that there had been a case of mistaken identity before the meal. D. was not an extremely common family name in the Saguenay, like Tremblay, Girard, or Bouchard, but it wasn’t rare either. It was perfectly possible that what with the rumour mill and distant memories, his father-in-law had imagined that D. was the son of a D. who was not his father.

  That explained the reappearance. It also explained how a man who claimed to be an old friend, and who had maintained close ties in the region so as to eventually return there, could have utterly failed to hear about the death notice.

  Of course, that dispensed with the misunderstanding at the expense of the story. On the other hand, you could invent hundreds of stories and as many different fathers for D., to compound the problem. You could invent for him a fraudster father on the run, a gangster father turned Crown witness, a spy father, an amnesiac father, a father abducted by extra­terrestrials, a father in the Foreign Legion, a homosexual father prey to a blackmailer, a serial killer father, an alcoholic or drug addict father, or, my favourite, an amateur existentialist who had vanished from view and founded elsewhere a new family just like his old one, to put his personal freedom to the test.

  On the one hand I’m doing away with the mystery by providing a lacklustre ending. On the other I’m appropriating it and reducing it to nothing through the practice of fiction (and facile fiction, to boot). To tell the story is already to rob it of its power and fascination. For me it all ends just where it began, with the disclosure of a return from the dead that gives rise to an abundance of hypotheses, but none so presumptuous as to shine a glaring light onto this ghostly marvel.

  Nothing made writing more difficult for me than this fundamental impossibility. Like the anti-madeleines of my father in which all memory is swallowed up, the stories I like are untellable, or suffer from being told, or self-destruct in the very act of being formulated.

  I once talked about this to my father.

  We were at a fishing camp in the Valin Mountains.

  In the dark, outside, there were insects and animals and plants to which the moon had lent a different colour than what was theirs in the light of day. In the beam of a gas lamp, in the light, there were only the two of us, my father and me.

  It was late, and we were two-thirds of the way through a bottle of Johnnie Walker. As was usual in such circumstances, my father wanted me to explain to him things I was too drunk to elucidate. This time he was asking me questions about writing. He wanted to know why I sometimes arrived with my baggage full of bits of stories and beginnings of novels, and why sometimes, for long years, I didn’t write a line. I said:

  “It’s not as easy as that.”

  “What’s so hard? I know thousands of stories. If I could write I’d write all the time.”

  “Yes, but you wouldn’t know so much about it if you spent your time reading other people’s books.”

  “People who know stories can’t write them, and people who can write them don’t have enough stories. It’s not fair.”

  “I know lots of stories. It’s not that that stops me.”

  “What then?”

  “It’s telling them that’s the problem.
I can never find a way to put what I want into the stories.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know Proust?”

  “French author of In Search of Lost Time. Six letters.”

  “Right. That thing there is an Everest. Something like four thousand pages. In it, the narrator tastes a madeleine at the beginning, and that brings back all his childhood memories. Can you imagine? The guy got a whole world out of a cookie.”

  “A madeleine is not really a cookie.”

  “I know. But I don’t have anything close to that. I have no madeleine. All we wanted, when we were kids, was McDonald’s.”

  “I remember. The kids’ games outside and the smell of French fries in the car.”

  “And McNuggets. I feel like all our stories end at the table, rather than start there. The only story that comes back to me from taking a bite of something has to do with a mouthful of McNugget. I was ten years old, and we were celebrating my birthday in the basement of McDonald’s in Jonquière, in the children’s room. I took a bite out of a McNugget, and Julie Morin asked me to give her the rest. At the age of ten, offering her the chewed up half of a McNugget was like offering her an engagement ring, or something like that. I was head over heels in love with her. I blushed, and held out the McNugget to her, and she smiled at me.”

  “Did she eat it?”

  “She didn’t have time. There were ladders on the ceiling, you remember? Laurent-Pierre Brassard was like a monkey on them. There was something intoxicating about walking like that on the ceiling, but playing the monkey, he’d got tired. He was just over us when his fingers slipped on the rung of a ladder. Before Julie could take her McNugget, Laurent-Pierre fell on top of us, and there was food everywhere, tables overturned, and pop on the floor. Julie Morin cried, and our engagement was off.”

  “Is all that true?”

  “I’d be surprised. Honestly, after a while you can’t tell a real story from an invented one any more, but I know that’s all the literature I’ll ever get out of a McNugget. And that’s where I always end up. McNuggets aren’t madeleines, forgetting trumps memory, and you can’t write all your life about how hard it is to tell a story.”