I am Carmelle Sakiagaq now, wife of Noah, mother of Tamusi, Joshua and Timarq, and you can plead with me with your eyes, but nothing will force me to bring Angèle to life in the hallways of the Quatre-Temps.
There are moments that are worth a lifetime. I knew that I would find what I was looking for in the first glance they exchanged. As soon as I saw Tommy, I positioned myself to watch her advance through the crowded lobby until she was in the Old Maid’s line of sight and, in the loudest voice I could, I announced, ‘Tommy’s here!’ That’s when, in the searing intensity of the looks exchanged, I found the missing piece of my puzzle. But no one guessed what El Toro – Lucien by birth – was hatching.
I’ve been probing a bottomless pit for so long – I wonder if I can truly be at the end of my quest.
First I had to figure out that Angèle died in the accident at the mine. Like the others, I had seen her get into Émilien’s car after the accident. Like the others, I had seen her, looking well, almost smiling, in the back seat of the car, and then I never saw her again.
Was I already a journalist at heart or did I become one by dint of stalking the silences and the looks exchanged whenever Angèle’s ghost haunted a conversation?
I had no reason to doubt Angèle’s leaving or the lingering image of her. It was entirely plausible that she had gone to study in Montreal. She liked school, and she was drawn to polite society. And anyway, things were falling apart at home.
It was what was said afterward and passed along sibling to sibling, with insistence and conviction, that planted the seeds of doubt in my mind. Regular information that was both contradictory and peremptory and that told a story of an incredibly successful life, a life worthy of any of our dreams, and one that kept her away, always farther away, but alive. She had studied history, philosophy, sociology and who knows what else at Université de Montréal, McGill or Sir George Williams, it didn’t matter. The important thing was that the school be prestigious. Then she worked at Radio-Canada, the United Nations, UNESCO, on diplomatic missions and at embassies. She travelled a lot, in Europe, Asia and Africa. We lost track of her somewhere, but I no longer believed all the globe-trotting. I knew she was dead.
It took years of doubts and feeling my way in the dark to become sure of it.
Every time I interviewed a prominent bureaucrat at the United Nations or UNESCO, someone who could have run into Angèle in the course of her career, near the end I would make sure to turn the interview to personal matters and ask my question. Obviously, my subjects didn’t know Angèle. The answer never surprised me. I was just trying to confirm what I had long guessed.
I knew she was dead, all the evidence pointed to it, but I needed some doubt. I needed to think that she had escaped the accident, and escaped our awareness.
In fact, in all those years, I never stopped chasing the image of Émilien’s old Studebaker taking Angèle far away. The image is vivid, even though it’s fake. It looks like the image of Angèle leaving for the McDougalls, which infuriated us. Angèle wouldn’t be coming back this time wearing one of her ridiculous dresses. She had taken herself out of the image. She had made her peace with herself and left us to our fate.
In that final image where I see her almost smile, her head held high, she doesn’t even look at us. She is sitting in the back seat, her things gathered around her in brown paper bags, and she is waiting for Émilien to finish his preparations. He walks around the car, checks each tire with a kick, tests the shocks by putting all his weight on the hood, then lifts it, checks the oil. He has owned a Ford and a Rambler, but the Studebaker is his pride and joy.
Geronimo is in the front seat. He is leaving forever too. The only time we will ever see him again is on TV, being interviewed about the wars he has chased after, scalpel in hand, offering cold comment.
He is uneasy. He is chain-smoking, tapping on the car door, untying and retying his tie. I have never seen him so nervous.
Our leader was leaving, our mentor, the brains of the operation. There had been moments of revolt against the firm hand of his authority, but we never prevented his rise. His hazing, his remarks that humiliated us to the quick, his predator’s eye, which stung more than the lash of a whip, and the beatings that were inflicted on us with the devastating precision of lightning: we knew all of that was a way of steeling us for the battle we would have to wage against life. Even Angèle understood that.
He had to leave, and fast, because we would be called to account. All of us watching the preparations for departure knew that we would be held responsible for the accident. I was thirteen at the time, and I was keenly aware of the danger looming. They would come, and we would have to play it pretty cool to avoid having the finger pointed at us. If it wasn’t the police, it would be the people from New Northern Consolidated or the Norco hicks.
The worst were the hicks, the few little shits who had resisted and who might think their hour of glory had come, thanks to the disaster. But their last hope went up in smoke in the accident. They were pathetic. They had refused to leave their shacks and their lives of misery when everyone was abandoning Norco. In spite of the poverty, in spite of the hope growing dimmer with the years, they had hung on to the promise of the land of Cain, waiting for a miracle to give them back their mine and hand out riches by the fistful.
There were only nine inhabited enclaves left in the land of Cain. The Boissonneaults, the Laroses, the Morins, the Desrosiers. I could name them all – first name, last name, age, eye colour. Life in Norco was a constant battle between the Cardinals and all the others.
They would forgive us nothing. Our games, our bravado, our demented challenges, the grass fires we brought to their door, the bears we tormented to the point of madness that then besieged the town, muzzles torn by dynamite caps, and all the half-rotted cat carcasses that we carried in a procession through the potholed streets, their futile anger when they recognized their cat impaled on one of our spikes. The humiliation, the shame, the fear – they would not forgive us for having rubbed their noses in their own stupidity. But most of all, they would not forgive us for dashing their dreams.
Maybe they had settled into their poverty. Maybe they were using the dream of renewed prosperity to warm the bones of their misery. Maybe their dream was an illusion kept alive with no real hope. But it was all they had left of their dignity and they were going to want revenge.
The accident had happened just before Émilien, Geronimo and Angèle took their places in the counterfeit tableau. The tremor, more than the noise, was what had raised the alarm. Nothing actually moved, but we all felt it in our bodies when the earth lurched. There were three explosions – on that, we could all agree. The first, muffled and strong, followed by the second, which was booming, and finally, the third, which crescendoed into a terrible roar.
Even before the third explosion, we were all outside and running toward the mountain, where – we knew, we hoped with all our might – we would find the mine, our mine, out of commission, to anyone and everyone for centuries to come.
The hicks, rushing in a herd to the site of the disaster, joined us to watch the earth sink into the earth, the rock being sucked into the rock. The explosion had hit the heart of the mine, opening a pit that swallowed up huge masses of rock. We saw the last swallows of the subterranean depths. It threw up a thick cloud of dust and a strong, distinct odour that left no doubt as to the source of the disaster: the smell of dynamite.
They were too hick to openly accuse us. They had arrived on the mountain at top speed and joined our circle around the crater left by the explosion, but as the smell of dynamite became evident, they couldn’t bear to be near us, and they withdrew. One by one, moving sluggishly, they left our ranks and gathered in a ball of hatred near the mine office. They were all there: men, women and children. And they kept repeating Geronimo’s name: ‘Where’s Geronimo? Geronimo’s not here? Has anyone seen Geronimo?’
Where was Geronimo? Behind us, concealed by the dust or hiding out in a building, w
atching the scene from the beginning, rushing to get rid of the traces of the explosion on his clothes? We never knew whether he had just arrived or had been there all along.
He emerged from the ranks and turned to face them. On top of his game. His voice didn’t waver. He didn’t flinch.
‘What do you want?’
In the teeming mass, someone grumbled, ‘Oh, come on. You know perfectly well. You’ll pay for this.’ The accusation was there, in their eyes, in the muted bleating of their voices, in the fists they wanted to use on us and that were held tight against their thighs. They couldn’t confront us openly.
A short time later, Geronimo sat in Émilien’s Studebaker, and no one bothered to check whether, in the back seat, Angèle was indeed Angèle.
It was a summer’s day, one of those days that burn you up head to toe and leave you without a single drop of sweat to dry in the sun. Summer in Norco was like the Sahara until August. We lived in a vortex of dry steam under a sky shimmering cruelly until, out of pity, the clouds would burst and send torrential rain pounding down on us for weeks.
The night before, we had celebrated Pester’s birthday. He had turned eleven, and we went to celebrate the event at the quarry, as was the family tradition. It was a nice enough explosion, though a bit anemic for my tastes. I like a blast with something to it, one that lifts itself off the ground like a furious beast and spits destruction in every direction. Pester’s, unfortunately, suffocated before it was born. The sand, which had been heated white hot for weeks, was little more than dust. The dynamite blast coaxed nothing more than a big powdery fart out of it, which evaporated in a diffuse circle. It was a letdown.
The Big Kids were there for the occasion. They had come from Montreal, Quebec City and even Toronto, with the shine of big-city glory on them. No one had been abroad yet. Émilien was just starting to dream of Australia; he had brought with him a pamphlet full of blue skies, sheep-speckled grasslands and broad Aboriginal smiles. The pamphlet was a challenge to us. It represented the freedom to roam the continents – it was the world in the palm of our hands. These samples of life were part of what made the Big Kids wise.
The house was full to bursting. We didn’t have enough beds, chairs or time. There weren’t enough hours for the spectacle that was our family.
The discussions were never-ending. The Big Kids brought news of the big city. We told them about our latest skirmishes, and together we circled the globe, with mandatory stops at anything that raised our indignation and provided an opportunity to rail against the stupidity of people, which I loved to do. I think these conversations were what led me to journalism.
In the kitchen, in the living room, on the porch and even upstairs, it was a rapid fire of voices talking over one another, all fuelled by the same lust for life. We wanted to rebuild the world on the foundations of an ideal that was ours alone. A world striving toward the ultimate achievement, a work of uncompromising truth. ‘Life is not for the faint hearted,’ Geronimo would say.
I was still too young to join in, but I agreed with everything that was said, and I didn’t want to miss a thing. I went from the living room to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the study. I went up and down the kitchen ladder, and I climbed the outdoor stairs. I was always on the move, looking for the most important conversation of the moment.
Most often I would find myself in the living room, where Geronimo, Big Yellow and Fakir were, our most fervent speechifiers, and where the three-seater sofa was, which, although sagging and gaping in a number of spots, was still the best seat in the house. There were no sofa battles; a truce took hold, but for laughs, for the Big Kids, who had felt an amused nostalgia for it, each of us said Smyplace, distinctly and consciously, even if all we had to give up was a corner of dusty floor.
Our father came into the living room a few times. He never stayed long. All of that youth intimidated him, I think, and he went back to his fog of dreams in the basement.
Most of all I remember our mother, in her nightgown, barefoot as usual, with her smile of the Madonna. She was spent from her efforts with her pots and pans, having cooked one of her fabulous meals, and she was nodding off in a chair in the corner of the living room. Her nightly rounds had long been a thing of the past.
That family gathering was our last. The next day was the accident at the mine. Geronimo and Émilien left, taking the counterfeit image of Angèle with them.
When there is no coffin, no funeral, no burial, it is hard to reconcile yourself with the unacceptable. Even once it became inescapable, I rejected the idea of Angèle’s death, and I clung to the doubt created by the half-smiling image in the Studebaker.
It took the smallest of things for the comfort of doubt to disappear forever. All it took was the beginnings of a smile. Angèle’s smile on Tommy’s lips.
It was years after that July afternoon. Only a few of us still saw each other. The Cardinals had started to disband. Émilien was in Australia, Fakir was in Vancouver, Big Yellow was somewhere in Latin America, not to mention Geronimo, Pester, Matma and Tut, from whom there had long been no word. No one was surprised when one of us disappeared.
I had started a career as a journalist, which I was suitably impressed by. I worked at La Presse, a fine place for the ambitious, and I fired on anything that moved. I was young, hungry for success and very lonely.
And it was by chance during a long solitary walk that I discovered another solitude, a woman who was looking for the moon in the towering glass of the buildings. Tommy, my sister.
She was walking slowly in front of me. The night was cold, freezing really – it was January, the cruellest winter month – and this woman was wandering the streets of Montreal, carefree and nonchalant as a bather on the beach.
Without realizing it, I started to keep pace with her, and it was only when we reached Marie-Anne Street that she turned toward me – ‘Just what is it you want from me?’ she said – and I realized that I was following her.
It took me a moment to recognize her. She had deep wrinkles around her mouth, her face had grown fuller, and, most significantly, there was a disquietingly powerful immobility inside her. But Tommy, the moon hunter, recognized me immediately: ‘El Toro … ! Is that you? What on earth do you want?’
To talk, that’s all I wanted. To talk about her, about me, to talk about everything and nothing at all, to talk to pick up the thread of our lives. We hadn’t seen each other since we had both left Norco.
We went into a nearby bar, and we spent what was left of the night talking. She listened carefully, both smiling and serious, and kept the conversation focused on me: me and my job, me and my love life, me and everything I fed with my hope and bitterness. She clearly didn’t want to talk about herself, either in the present or the past.
I was vaguely aware that she had become a nurse in the North and that she had married an Eskimo. ‘An Inuit,’ she specified, when I managed to raise the topic. ‘Eskimo means eater of raw meat, a name the White Man gave us that everyone in the North rejects. Inuit, in Inuktitut, means real man, and that’s the right word for us.’
Us? I couldn’t help but notice the us, which made me feel queasy, but she had taken refuge behind her steady stare and I didn’t pursue it.
I did manage to find out that she was on a mission, escorting a young Inuit man to the hospital, Hôtel-Dieu, I think – ‘acute peritonitis,’ she explained – and that she was having a hard time finding the peace of what she called her moon days.
‘I don’t eat seal meat, but I eat mattaq and panirtitaq. I use an ulu to cut meat, and I have three boys with Inuit features who won’t come with me when I come down South. So when I go for a walk in your moonless night, I can’t help but think how much I have become an Inuit. But at home, in Kanjirsujuaq, I’m a Qallunaaq, a white woman.’
All the q’s and g’s that she formed at the back of her throat made me feel queasy again. I had had more than one whisky.
And Angèle, have you forgotten her? Have you forgotten Angèle w
hile you’ve been stuffing mattaq and panirmachintaq in your face? Have you thrown your whole past overboard to become the docile wife of an Inuit man?
I wanted to shake her, force her to open up another side of her life to me. And what about us, Tommy, have you forgotten us? Have you forgotten what keeps us in Norco? A whole battalion of questions that I had to hold back, because I knew that the fiery eyes veiled in velvet would stop me from going any further than what we had tacitly agreed upon from the start.
And it was after the fifth or sixth whisky that Magnum showed up, and we shifted into our family’s parallel universe.
I was surprised to see him in that bar of all bars. Whenever I meet him, it’s on Saint-Jacques Street, near the stock exchange, where he dabbles without getting rich. I’m the one who picks up the cheque when we go out to eat. This little cave-like bar, long and drafty, where Tommy and I were sitting at a tiny table set in a recess in the wall, was a long way from the chrome bars he normally haunts.
Judging by his gait, he was smashed, and he was heading to the bathroom when he hesitated in front of our table.
‘Hey! It’s … it’s Angèle!’
I wanted to make a joke to erase the mistake, but, in that brief hesitation, I had the revelation that had been waiting for me all those years. Before me, like a stone statue that comes to life and becomes human with the wave of a magic wand, I saw Tommy’s face open up, start to shine, her features become smooth, her eyes light up, and on her lips I saw the caress of that smile, Angèle’s soft smile, which made us believe, for a moment, that time had stood still and that she had come back to us. A moment of grace that evaporated as soon as Magnum made a move toward her.
‘Hey, Ange … ’
Tommy’s eyes immediately darkened, all her features hardened, she became herself again, prickly, menacing, a wild beast crouched in rage, and Magnum, suddenly understanding his mistake, sunk into the chair where he had plunked himself down. Stone-cold sober.
Twenty-One Cardinals Page 8