by Noah Richler
* * *
It’s not the first time I have found myself in this state — as if standing before a hole. In 2005, a few months before the publication of my first book, Quelque chose se détache du port, a collection of prose poems in the manner of the avant-gardists Francis Ponge and Tristan Tzara, I remember telling myself the same thing: you’re standing before a hole. I was living in Paris, not far from Butte-aux-Cailles, a hilltop community a mere sixty-three metres high. The apartment that I was renting had walls covered in faded tapestry. Some cockroaches kept me company, they came from the Asian food store downstairs and I was used to their presence. At least on paper, everything was fine: my resident status described me as a pensionnaire scientifique étranger (a “foreign scientist on annuity”) at the École Normale Supérieure, where I was getting by on sizeable scholarship grants and the points of my thesis were writing themselves easily. But nothing, meanwhile, chased away the uncomfortable thought: if I am incapable of starting a second book then sure, it all looked swell on paper, but in life I was nothing.
* * *
I didn’t fall into the hole. A few weeks later, I found myself yet again at the Centre Pompidou at a contemporary art exhibition and then at the cinema watching Woody Allen’s Match Point. Things had become unblocked and I went on to write a first novel — a book about tennis, architecture, and Hamlet, and I was naïve enough to believe that I’d superseded “the agony of the blank page.” I believed as much because after Matamore n° 29, sentences came to me more rapidly. I’d just been installed at McGill University, and I was about to recount the story of my own malaise on top of another even more distressing one of the bicentennial institution of which I was afraid of becoming a foot-soldier.
* * *
With Pourquoi Boulogne, the story to which I am referring, the hole appeared again though much later in the proceedings. The first draft of the book had been written, and it was bad. I’d ventured something linear, but there was nothing in my experience to correlate with a conventional beginning, middle and end construction. Ultimately, I discovered the form of my book in the very depths of what it told. Its narrator is lost — for sure, both in his mind and in the city in which he is living — but, as frequently you’ll find amid the alienated, he is a narrator that is nonetheless methodical, one contending both with the medicine that he is swallowing and that which he writes, aware that in the disturbance we call literature, both madness and reason are (if we may borrow the psychiatric term) “actualized” according to a shared morbid logic.
* * *
The narrator who has lost his mind in Pourquoi Boulogne has my name; the city, Montreal, is also mine. I still have the same name, and I am still living in the same city. Today is April 7th 2015 and I haven’t written a word in two years. My friend Noah Richler and his ‘North-South Project’ have provided me the opportunity to begin to work again. But for the third time in my life, I find myself standing before a hole. The books that I have already written no longer belong to me, and whichever are those to come exist less than children yet unborn.
* * *
Forget about where to begin; it’s a story with a thousand tellings. I’m looking for the one that hurts the least but there’s no such thing.
I left home punctually and I walked to this mountain or hill or whatever you choose to call it, the flanks of which I inhabit, and did not stop until just before the Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges. As I neared you, Myriam, and the summit of Mont-Royal, I said to myself, my brain will have oxygen, I’ll have in my head the beginning of a book. But it did not come.
* * *
True, the hole is the same, but the situation is different. My first three books were tombstones, they were homages to the disappeared — to Téta Aïda, my grandmother; Nab Safi, my uncle, and Thomas Braichet, a French friend with whom I studied a lot in Paris in 2005-2006. All I know, at this particular moment, is that the fourth book will also be a tombstone. But the situation is different. The book will be a tombstone, again, but one I come to terms with not, as was the case with the other three, in the course of writing, or accidentally; I already know as much before beginning. But everything that this certainty implies about my intentions so vertiginous, terrifies me. It is for this reason that I am ignoring where to begin, ignoring how to start writing again.
* * *
If I have waited two years for another book to come, it is because the worst had to happen — and the worst did come to pass. I’d been anticipating a writer’s experiment with loss but, at the same time, felt ashamed to be here, impotent and waiting for the task. This stupor was my reaction to my best friend Myriam’s terrible sickness. I’d tried to be close to her during her fight, but it never works out quite like that. The ill are always on their own and maybe that’s what kills them. After several weeks, Myriam’s struggle reached its crescendo. Mym, Mimi, mother of two young children, godmother to my son — Myriam died at the end of December 2014. She died but, fortunately, she did not disappear. She must not disappear. And that’s what is obsessing me: to be able, in the book to come, to convey how much she lived in everything from her jet-black hair to her frenetic laughter, from her affecting insecurities to an irreprehensible kind of loyalty that could, under the pretext of helping one of her own, lead her in good conscience down an avenue of bad faith.
* * *
Faith, there’s another way of describing the hole. Because one leaps over without falling into it; because, standing before the hole, one has to believe, to have faith without really knowing the why or the how of it. (What French translation exists for that marvelous Anglophone expression, the ‘leap of faith’?)
I am standing before a hole because I have not started my next book and I approach this hole as if to triumph over anguish, for as long as I am in anguish I will not be writing. I must dive into the hole, but I find myself receding. This book to come, like the previous ones, will banish my nightmares, I’m sure of it, but how do I relate the sickness and terrible death of my best friend? How do I speak of a voyage not yet made to Jerusalem? Do I retrace the life of the Oratoire’s Frère André? Reconstruct the Egypt of my father as a Christian in the Middle East? How do I write another book when I am standing asleep?
* * *
It’s been fifteen years since I read Christophe Tarkos and I still find in his phrsaes something to go by. The French poet — he was another who died too young — has this formula in Anachronisme, his book as testament: “My illness is to speak and the cure for my illness is to speak.”
* * *
How better to define the hole before which I am standing, and the manner I have of not diving in? In order to build Myriam’s tomb I must fill the hole, this is what I told myself on the way to the mountain. As is true for so many Montrealers, this place was especially important in the life of my friend, regardless of her having decided to make it her last resting place. The last time I held Myriam’s hand, in the Palliative Care unit of the Jewish General, it was the middle of the December night and through the window was the vision of an illuminated Oratoire Saint-Joseph that appeared to mock us. A few hours before losing consciousness, Myriam, as I remarked to her just how magnificent was the view of the sanctuary, said something curious to me about the nurse that, earlier along the journey, observes the majestic site from afar and appeals to it for a miracle. I no longer remember, perhaps because of my fumbled words, the exact moment in which my wife and I said our good-byes to Myriam. Faced with the ineluctability of the end, I remember only, as happens rarely, that words failed me, and regretting for a long time my not having been sufficiently intelligent to shut up.
* * *
I am in the archives of the Oratoire, digging away at aged documents. The last time I came here, it was to visit the crypt and chapel of the sanctuary. Mym and I, we were here together to pray that the results of some blood test or scan, I no longer remember which, would be encouraging. Afterwards we went to have ice cream
with the children. In the months that followed, we persisted with our prayers in various churches, in various synagogues, in all sorts of places. When I managed, finally, to make my way inside the Oratoire, I’d run away from the rooms dedicated to its religious cult, searching instead for a corner of the building that I could consecrate, in the years to come, to writing. My writing, I was well aware, would have none of the serenity of prayer about it. It would be writing as riposte, and perhaps profanity. This, because I’d convinced myself that Myriam would be cured through prayer — through faith. I am furious with myself for telling her that for a century the Oratoire has been a place of astonishing healing. Everything I know, standing before this hole I’ve dug and the book that I am unable to start holds me in sorry check — the check of God. And I’ve no idea how literature will help me surmount it.
Through it all, life: sorrow and joy, achievements and disappointments, illusions and foolishness; we are unknowing and lost each step of the way. We learn this world through phenomena strange and at our very doorstep. We travel, restlessly, endlessly, but in truth need go no further. The threshold right in front of us is a door and a window onto everything and it is open all the time.
HOW TO BE A NORTH AMERICAN WRITER
ANTONIO SKÁRMETA
Chile
When I was 18 years old, living in Chile, I yearned to be a writer of the Americas.
But let me make myself clear. My aspiration was to be a North American writer.
Those guys were pumped. If they had belonged to the financial world, they’d have been titans in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heroes. Where they preferred to live out on the margins, they’d be smoking a joint, studying Zen Buddhism or cruising the United States in vintage automobiles with fashionable women to keep them company, scribbling literary bibles like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in three weeks.
The music of my vision was syncopated, a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack that nourished the literary fantasies of younger me, a student in provincial, rainy Santiago.
The jackets of my idols were various — white and fringed in the style of Elvis Presley, red like James Dean’s in Rebel without a Cause, or the black leather and shiny metal armour that Marlon Brando wore in The Wild One.
What did not vary was the dream, or at least the certainty that there was more to life than the routine of a Chilean city punished by dull anonymity, that instead life might be filled instead the bright neon lights of Times Square, or the dusty lofts of San Francisco where pale and ardent Cinderellas await the arrival of their princes.
One day, de bon matin (as Boris Vian sang in the ballad “El Desertor”), I suggested to my parents in vague terms that I’d be travelling north. This excused me from having to add any further details.
‘North’, after all, is as much the village thirty kilometres away, as it is Alaska. And besides, I was channeling a little of the craftiness of the great Chilean avant-garde poet, Vicente Huidobro, who’d described the four points of the compass are three: north and south.
Off I went to conquer the United States, hitch-hiking in dilapidated trucks that broke apart as they crossed the discombobulating desert kilometre by kilometre, that had their worn-out tires retreaded in repair shops where there was not a drop of water to be found, though buckets of sweat. Travelling by land in this way amounted to my due, an apprentice North American writer determined neither to be Mommy and Daddy’s little boy anymore, nor, in the course of the Great Adventure to be left behind as a skeleton to be savoured by birds of prey at the bottom of some nameless cliff.
Would I have traveled by plane? Not a chance. Planes were for boys on Fulbright scholarships, or the salesmen of Philip Morris cigarettes.
I managed to reach the city of Antofagasta after two thousand kilometres that weighed upon me in my backpack like the work of two decades. Further to the North was Bolivia and, straight out of a Cowboys and Indians movie, a railroad crossing the desert to La Paz (which means ‘the peace’). Proudly I spent the last of my money on a chicken sandwich and a third class ticket.
That train was the closest I’d ever experienced to a person dying, and a ways away from the stupendous Greyhound bus I’d be boarding in New Orleans, one driven by an African-American singing the blues, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin as I, meanwhile, played poker in the back seat.
I suffered from burning heat all through the day and stinging cold at night.
Good, I told myself. The worse off I have it, the better my North American novel will be.
At dawn, under a sun that set fire to the desert, the train coughed and groaned as it entered the station at Oruro. Troupes of musicians, dancers and singers had arrived on the platforms to celebrate the carnival. Girls that appeared to have fifteen skirts layered upon their bodies made them sway in the breeze. From their copper-toned faces burst saucy and welcoming smiles.
One of those girls (what fun it is to be writing, after the fact, about what happened with “one of those girls”), without putting a stop to her dancing, approached the train window. Her smile doubled. I smiled back, and with more teeth than Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker, no question.
“Come down and dance with me,” the girl said.
“I can’t.”
“And why not?”
“I’m going to La Paz.”
“Peace you’ll have when you die,” she said. “Come down. Now.”
Out the window went my backpack and then her love-struck servant. A cup of coffee was followed by a glass of brandy, a carnival song I didn’t know how to dance and then a cueca, a typical Northern tune. After the cueca came a beer from La Paz and, after the beer, a slow waltz played by trombones; the waltz was accompanied by bottle of Pisco brandy, a first kiss in the square, and then a siesta steamy with the whirling of skirts and sperm before, falling into the total dream of a timeless, indigenous Latin American girl, I thought I could make out in the distance, the smoke of the train incinerating in its boilers my future as a North American writer.
The love of one day extended to a week and the eyebrows of the girl’s father became surly. Head crowned with a yellow helmet, he would leave every morning for the tin mine where he worked, sensing that as soon as he went down into the depths of the earth, I would sink into his daughter’s bed.
Finally on the Sunday, there was a demonstration of infinite courtesy: without my having to ask, my clothes had been folded into my backpack. I surprise her by starting to walk towards the station — a fleeting kiss on the cheek of my beloved, the tremulous promise that I would write to her, and then I ran to catch the train. But on the platform I stumbled and hit my shoulder and sensed in the tender hit that I was being expelled from paradise.
I caught the train — but back to Chile.
For now it was my America that I was seeking.
Translated by Mary Luz Mejia.
Lost is the condition that is taught us from earliest days and, to claim our place, we tell our story, or make one up. Use language as it has been taught to us, of course, though sometimes the word is a sign, a mark, or even a physical trait that we use to telegraph ourselves and anchor the schoolboy lost in a sea of difference. Whatever the means, the truth of ourselves is the certainty that we’ll eventually find.
And shouldn’t that be enough?
MINE EYES ARE LEAN
INS CHOI
Scarborough, Canada
I can’t find my hat. I haven’t been able to find my hat for the past four years. It’s a felt hat. Kinda like a beanie? It’s brown on the outside with a grey trim. Actually, it’s grey on the outside with a brown trim but I wear it inside out. It’s actually my wife’s hat. Don’t know where she got it from. After we got married, I saw the hat, turned it inside out, liked how I looked in it, it became mine. See, the thing is, I don’t look good in most hats. That’s why I loved that hat. I looked good in it. I kinda have a big head. Koreans have big heads. The men. I’m Korean.
And my head has corners. Rounded corners at the back. There’s a picture of me in Korea when I was six months old — our whole family is by a riverbank — and my head, completely bald, has right angles. I’m not kidding. It’s like a protractor. No, not a protractor. What’s that thing called? What am I thinking of? And I think I’m pretty good looking, like, y’know, not ugly — but with hats, I kinda look ugly because of my big fat Korean head with ninety degree rounded corners in the back. Plus, I have a lot of hair, that’s part of it too. It’s thick up there. Dense. Hair follicles per square inch, like, I’m rivalling carpets or at least a towel. So my hair gets really poofy. My Asian friends call it an asio, like an afro but with Asian hair? And to tame it down I’d put some hair product in it, then put that hat on and a few minutes later, voila: normal looking hair. And another part of the equation - the back of my head is flat. Straight flat up. My black friends, growing up, all had these amazing skull shapes. I envied their skull shapes. Y’know, kinda rounds out in the back and curves all the way around? No corners. No right angles. No flatness. No poofy hair — well, if they grew out their afros, we’d be in the same ball park but any hat looked good on them. Caps. Toques. Helmets. Doorags. There was this one kid, Michael — we’re in grade five — he had the greatest skull shape I had ever seen in my life. I’d marvel at it from time to time in class. Michael was from Trinidad. Don’t know if that had to do with it. I didn’t know he was from Trinidad initially. I thought maybe he was from Jamaica until the Jamaican kids started making fun of his accent. Tom spoke with an accent too. Tom was from Turkey. He was Muslim. The back of his skull angled out straight and then curved around. Not straight flat up, not like mine. I’d notice it when he’d bow his head to pray before he ate his lunch. I prayed before I ate too, but I’d kinda hide it. He wouldn’t. Either he didn’t know people were looking at him praying or he didn’t care. He was a proud Muslim. There were also these two Jehovah Witness kids, Susan and Ronald, who stood outside the class during the national anthem and the Lord’s Prayer. I know, the Lord’s Prayer in public school. This was a while back. Nowadays, in public school, you can only say the Lord’s name in vain. They were both from Brazil. I felt sorry for them. Not because they were from Brazil but because every morning, they had to step out. Kinda put an unwelcome spotlight on them. That’s why I’d kinda hide praying before I ate my lunch. But as soon as Michael Jackson and Prince hit it big (both Michael Jackson and Prince were Jehovah’s Witnesses), those two Brazilian kids were proud to be Jehovah’s Witnesses. Heck, we all wanted to be witnesses for Jehovah. Except for Tom. Tom was a proud Muslim. He was also chubby. He was a proud chubby Muslim. A Prouchublim. But not fat. There was the fat kid at school, Dante. He took the pressure off of a lot of us. Dante was from Macedonia. He was an Eastern Orthodox Macedonian. They’d celebrate Christmas and Easter a little later. Dante would often insist that he was Macedonian and not Greek. He took offence when people thought he was Greek. People always thought I was Chinese. I didn’t take offence. It was an honest ignorant mistake. I could see how that could happen. And how bad could it be to be Chinese if Bruce Lee was Chinese. Come on. It was always Chinese or Japanese. Cuz I had dirty knees. And I could say, “Look at these”. Cuz I was chubby. But not fat. Dante was fat. But Tom was chubbier than me. Some of the Asian kids — we had this joke told only among us at recess. What do you call a fat chink? A chunk. I was kind of a chunk. But Tom was chunkier, if he were Asian, which he wasn’t, so he was just a Prouchublim — with man boobs. In class, sometimes, when the teacher wasn’t looking, he’d scoop out one of his man boobs and suck on the nipple. We would die laughing. I tried it once. Couldn’t reach. Tom taught me that you can look down a girls T-shirt sleeve while riding the streetcar as she’s holding the pole, and sometimes get a great boob glance. Oh, those dearly beloved, sacred, ephemeral boobglances . The first boob I ever glanced was in the movie Police Academy. Our grade five Sunday school teacher took us to see it. There we were, a bunch of second generation Korean-Canadian grade fivers from church, just south of Yonge and Bloor at the old Uptown Cinema on a spiritual, cultural field trip: Police Academy. There’s a scene in the movie where Steve Guttenberg is chasing someone along the beach. And all of a sudden, he passes by a group of girls, who’re on their fronts, sun bathing with the top of their bikinis undone. And as Steve Guttenberg passes by, they all pop up to see what all the fuss is about. And there they were, full